


from darkness, from clay

by spacehussy



Series: unfashioned creatures [1]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Sburb Session, Folie a Deux, Historical Fantasy, Inspired by Frankenstein, M/M, Mad Science, Medical Experimentation, Period Typical Attitudes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-31
Updated: 2021-02-14
Packaged: 2021-03-08 21:02:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 37,300
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27313042
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spacehussy/pseuds/spacehussy
Summary: “What would you do, if nothing could stop you?” he asks you. “What would you build?”--(In which an old academic rivalry between the best and brightest students of the Prospitian Royal University turns into a dark, spiraling courtship of blood and bones and metal.)
Relationships: John Egbert/Dirk Strider
Series: unfashioned creatures [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2163561
Comments: 52
Kudos: 64
Collections: DirkJohn Big Bang 2020





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Halloween!! Have some Frankenstein inspired dirkjohn to celebrate. I would like to thank my amazing bb teammate @ [kodoukat](https://www.instagram.com/kodou.kat.13/) who illustrated for me here. Please click through the previews for the full illustrations and check our her insta if you love spooky things :3c Frankenteam!!
> 
>  **Please Note** : While very little of it is explored in gruesome detail, sensitive topics like human and animal experimentation are central to the plot. Consider this a broad warning for matters of _highly_ unethical mad science and dark themes, but no torture for torture’s sake.

Pls click through for full image, art by Kodoukat!

* * *

When you met John at university, you hated him.

It wasn’t a great mystery why, to hear it told. There were widely-known, irrefutable facts that easily painted a story of jealousy and intimidation, one in which your failure at school was practically predetermined.

Because John came from a good family, and you came from nothing.

It was true that you had sacrificed much to be there, that you had traveled far for the opportunity, and that John lived down the street from the Prospitian Royal University, comfortable in a fine house. And you cannot deny that you thought he, like many of the others, had his place assured to him at school due to his good family, due to their wealth, and no other reason.

Yet you quickly came to understand that you had but one intellectual equal in that entire school, and it was John.

The two of you quickly rose to the top of your class, practically worlds away from your classmates, but it was a difficult crown to share. You resented what came easily to him; his studies, friendships and accolades, and that he would have so little to lose even if he failed at all.

You hated that he could join you at that narrowest, most difficult peak so effortlessly, and that he could still somehow deserve it.

From the start, you were made to feel like an invader. From students and instructors alike, you were seen as a conquering force, attempting to take what should be John’s birthright, but you wouldn’t relent.

And he didn’t want you to.

That was the problem, wasn’t it? Not that he dismissed or ignored you, like many of the others, or despised you equally in turn for the threat you posed for him and his family’s legacy—infuriatingly, he seemed thrilled at the prospect. It unnerved you that he so readily respected you, that he even seemed to understand you, despite the gulf of your differences and status.

John wanted to see you as a friend, but you felt he had enough of those, and so you became his rival instead. You hoped to disappoint him in this rejection, but he was gleeful at the challenge, throwing himself into your academic rivalry with abandon.

You hated him for that as well; for you, success was survival. For him, it was almost a game.

One that you lost.

When you inevitably fell from grace (or were perhaps pushed), none fought against your expulsion harder than John. In fact, no one else fought at all.

And that is what you remembered of him most often when you left the university, when you returned to your dark, empty house in Derse. Months spent sleepless and hungry, worked to the bone for your research, and for what?

Moments. A hundred stolen moments where you dared to look at him across the lecture hall, where you found him as wretchedly lean and exhausted as you, and knew that the two of you were the same.

* * *

For years after your disgraceful exit from the university, you hide away in your old family home. You bury yourself and your failures in work, tinkering and constructing, passing a thousand sleepless nights while barely thinking about John at all.

Instead, you build things, strange things, with rare metals twisted into tiny and impossible shapes. You experiment with electricity and nearly kill yourself a dozen times in the process, until your house bears the scars from not just one but several fires.

You build devices that capture light and sounds, others that move, like puppets on invisible string, until enough successes could shield your return to the golden city and all of its golden opportunities.

You aren’t looking for John when you return to Prospit, but he finds you anyway.

To be recognized was your greatest fear, especially after only days. It was a great risk to come back in the first place, not merely humiliating but dangerous too, yet you have ambitions beyond what Derse can afford you. You want to build, to create—and while you now know you don’t need a royal education to do any of those things, you still need resources.

At the sound of your name, you are instantly gripped with dread, particularly as it is carried on a familiar voice—but when you turn, when of all the faces you could see in a crowd is his, and he’s beaming like you were lost at sea, not sent away in shame—you can’t even help the spark that alights in your chest.

It feels different from fondness, different from desire. You don’t have a name for it, but it quickly doesn’t matter, as you are swept into a crushing hug from the person you most hated and most desperately hoped to impress.

You want to recoil, you do, but you don’t. You let him hold you as he exclaims in sentimental delight, and that spark inside begins to catch and burn, until finally you pull away, and he smiles at you still.

* * *

Truth be told, you don’t know how you ended up here.

You’ve been back in Prospit for only three days, much of it spent in the business district following up with potential leads, or near the docks where you’re renting a room. What socializing you’ve done has been in the pursuit of financing, and considering how you left Prospit the first time around, the last place you expected to find yourself is in John Egbert’s sitting room.

You haven’t seen John in years, but apparently he still knows how to upend your entire world in an instant.

And he made you tea.

You never thought you’d be back here, you think. You never wanted to. You should leave now, but all you do is settle back in your seat and hide your discomfort with an exasperated sigh.

“You know, I had places to be,” you tell him, and he smiles wide and shameless. It softens the nervous edges of your mood, despite your better judgement.

“Well, you haven’t changed,” he snorts, with none of the eloquence expected from a man of his station, just like you remember.

Catching up is awkward, at first. Mercifully, he spares you too many questions about your personal life in Derse. Instead, he asks you about your work; broadly to start, then in detail, until little by little, the tension bleeds from your shoulders.

You like the way he talks to you, after all this time. Like formalities are a suggestion, one he is free to ignore as much as he pleases, and expects you to do the same.

You tell him about the machines you’ve built; some large enough to fill a room, others small enough to fit in your palm. He seems impressed as you go on, not the type to hide it, and you allow yourself to feel a flash of pride. It’s been hard work. You’ve scraped by on project by project, gaining just enough notability to continue your work, but not enough to fund the designs bursting at the seams of your notebooks.

“Is that why you’re back in Prospit, chasing down investors?” John asks, direct almost to the point of rudeness.

If it were anyone else, you’d be offended; as it is, you nod.

“That’s the idea. My train doesn’t leave for a week, and I have appointments all over town.”

You’re missing one now, but you don’t tell him that. He’s gone thoughtful, frowning as he hums, and you don’t want to interrupt. You remember that face from the lecture hall; John’s brow furrowed throughout exams, chewing on his lip.

The memory isn’t as unpleasant as most others from school; you might even call it fond, despite everything.

In big ways and small, John seems much the same as you remember. He’s a little taller, though not so tall as you, and broader, a detail you noted when he whisked you off the street and set aside as quickly as you could.

Dangerous train of thought, really. You know he’s handsome, he was always handsome. It didn’t matter then and it doesn’t matter now.

“I wasn’t trying to mislead you, playing dumb about what you’ve been up to back home,” he says suddenly, sounding contrite. “But the truth is, I have been following your work. What I could learn about it, anyway.”

Oh. Maybe that shouldn’t surprise you, but it does.

“You could have said,” you say dryly, to hide how it flatters you. “I would have skipped ahead a little.”

John smiles, practically shameless now, and shrugs. “I wanted to hear about it from you! It’s way more interesting than reading old newspaper clippings.”

Again you feel that pang of surprised confusion. You don’t know what to say—(‘thank you’? ‘Why?’)—and wind up leaning forward to deposit your long-empty cup on its saucer for an excuse to break eye contact.

Without quite looking at him, you ask, “What about you, then, Mr Egbert?”

“That’ll be _Doctor_ Egbert,” he says, correcting you with a haughty flourish before dissolving into laughter. “Oh, you hated that, I’m sorry.” 

You did hate that, but at least with John you don’t have to hide it, and make a grand show of your exasperation. He gets a good laugh at your expense, and you allow it, if just to let him get it out of his system.

“That’s not much of a joke. Are you really?” you ask, once his laughter subsides. You feel tense, and you’re not sure why.

Guilty, maybe, that he cared enough to follow your engineering work, when you’ve barely thought of him in all this time? Or worse, jealous—resentful that he was able to continue his education, to reach his potential unobstructed, when you were not.

“I am,” he says, with a small nod. Your heart feels heavy for a moment, sinking in that miserable abyss, and then he continues, “I switched to medicine after you were _expelled_.”

John spits the word like an insult, and all you can do is stare at him in shock. You’re almost at a loss to hear him speak of it at all, much less so frankly, and with a bitterness that rivals your own.

In fact, he looks as though he has much to say on the topic, but shakes his head and continues on, with your heart pounding quietly in your chest.

“To be honest with you, I never really wanted to be a doctor,” he says, more softly now, as though he might be overheard. “I've always thought it was boring work.”

You weren’t expecting that. You weren’t expecting any of this.

“Okay, I know how that sounds! I was really good at it though, and it was important, but by the time I finished my studies…” He exhales. “It was too late to matter much anyway.”

Your chest tightens at the words, his strange tone. He’s not looking at you anymore.

“Are you—” you start, though you barely know what you’re asking, only that you feel unsettled.

John seems to understand, because he looks up at you again at once, blue eyes wide and placid.

“Oh, no. Haha. I’m not sick.” He smiles, and it’s friendly enough, but for a moment it seems almost mechanical to you, and you wonder just how much of that warmth he truly feels.

You don’t get a chance to ask. After asking you endless curious questions about your work, he seems ready to talk about himself.

Despite how boring he apparently found the miracles of medicine, John finished his education early, top of his class. If you expected to feel bitter about that part, the feeling never quite materializes, apart from a small, yearning ache that you could not join him.

You learn that like you, he’s not married, and he has no children. That part does surprise you, given his family’s status, and the expectations around it. Particularly as he is the only son.

But then, so are you.

“Too buried in our work,” he laughs, and you don’t correct him.

He was a surgeon for a while, he says, and now an ectopathologist.

You sit up at that. Ectobiology, the science outside the body; of course John found _that_ interesting.

You remember ectobiology from school, though not much. From what you know, the study is complex and secretive, and indeed, John dodges what specific questions you have to learn more, smiling as he speaks in vague generalities about his work. 

The longer he talks, however, the more he seems to grow on edge. Distracted almost, as though the topic of his own life bores him. His gaze increasingly darts around until—with anyone else—you would assume he wanted you to leave.

Except you’ve never known John to be shy in that regard; if he wanted you gone, he’d be handing you your coat.

It’s a comforting thought. He’s still John. Your rival, never friend. When he smiles at you across the sitting room, you can’t help but feel that spark again, familiar and warm.

But he’s hiding something, you think. Holding back in some way.

It doesn’t worry you. The more he fidgets and glances around the room, the more it seems like he wants nothing more but to tell you, but hasn’t found the nerve.

You don’t push. You like the sight of him like that, squirming and eager for your input, and terrible at hiding it. For someone like John to hold your opinion in such high regard… what would your old instructors think?

Whatever is on his mind, he doesn’t tell you, not that night.

It is long past any decent hour when you finally leave, and he clasps your hands and shoulders like a long lost brother as you depart. It’s late; the night outside his door is cold, but his hands are so warm, and you can’t help but shiver.

He must not notice, because he doesn’t let go.

“C’mon, stay here. There’s more than enough room, you don’t always have to be so difficult,” says John, the bite of the words softened by another squeeze to your shoulder.

You can’t stay. You won’t stay. You know better.

But you will return, you promise him that.

* * *

The next morning, however, you try and put John out of your mind.

You have to remind yourself that you’re in Prospit for business, for your _future_ , not to socialize. The meeting you missed in favor of a class reunion could not be rescheduled, and it’s a loss you’ll have to stomach.

You have other priorities, you tell yourself; appointments and goals to meet. John simply isn’t a factor in that future.

Even if it was good to see him.

It doesn’t matter. You try not to think about your parting words to him; it was a promise made at the end of a long day and longer night, one he likely doesn’t expect for you to keep in the first place. He’s probably already forgotten.

You almost manage to convince yourself of that. You even manage to get John out of your head, for a little while. But then you spend nearly the rest of the week chasing meetings all over town and back again, with little progress to show for it, and your thoughts become much harder to control.

Your train for Derse leaves in another few days, and the lack of progress you’ve made to secure funding—in fact, the lack of any substantive interest in your designs…

It stings. You’re often prone to pessimistic thoughts, and the rejections, polite as they have been, have chipped away at you. It leaves you on edge and restless, and increasingly eager for a distraction as the sun sets on another long day.

You could return to the docks, you know. The streets by your rented room bustle with activity late into the night, with dockhands and sailors getting into drinks and brawls and debauchery below your window.

You don’t really drink, but you don’t want to be alone. You dread returning to your room, spending a sleepless night with nothing but your thoughts for company, haunted by the fear that circles at the darkest edges of your mind.

The fear of leaving Prospit in failure, all over again. That you don’t belong here, you never did.

You don’t want to think, but thinking is all you ever do. You need noise, light, company. Perhaps even the kind of company that could help drown out your desperate, churning thoughts.

You mean to go to the docks. You’re quite sure that was what you had decided to do, but instead, your restlessness brings you without invitation to John’s front door.

This is the last street you want to be on, but here you are, hoping to catch the one person in Prospit worth seeing.

You haven’t knocked. Maybe you shouldn’t have made the trip. But you promised you’d come back—and maybe you’re curious, you can’t deny it. He’s left you so curious.

As you stand there at his doorstep, searching for the will to knock in the growing dark, you gaze up at John’s house, and you have a strange thought.

You didn’t notice upon your first visit, but something about the house seems unusual to you. It’s difficult to pin down, as you had never visited during your time at the university.

Though you remember, with a brief flash of embarrassed heat, that he had invited you more than once.

While you may not be able to compare its current state to the past, you can’t help but think that for such a fine house, it seems to you very empty, and in some places, a state of disrepair.

It’s dark, though not yet late, and you would expect most of the lights to be on, or to see the shadow of movement, from servants if not the occupants.

In fact, it would almost appear abandoned, if not for a few lit windows on the ground floor.

One window, you think, is the sitting room, and you take a chance assuming he’s home, and he is, for it’s no servant answering the door for you but the young master of the house himself. He beams at the sight of you, but to your mixed disappointment and relief, he doesn’t try to hug you this time.

“Took you long enough!” he laughs, and gestures you inside. “I was starting to think you went back to Derse already.”

Is that sincere disappointment running through his words? You try not to get your hopes up, shaking your head. “Not for another few days.”

Although it’s the last thing you want to talk about, you let him lead you into the sitting room again with half-hearted smalltalk about your hunt for investors. You don’t want him to think you’re here to beg for money. Your stomach turns unpleasantly to even think of it, so you manage to say quite a lot of things without admitting anything at all about your failures.

More importantly, you wanted a distraction, and you quickly realize you have it. Once he’s brought you inside, your suspicions about the state of his house only grow.

Much like the outside you could see, the interior has slipped into deep neglect. In your old family home in Derse, visible dust on every surface and chipped paint would hardly raise an eyebrow, but for a house down the street from the royal university, it seems an almost scandalous affair.

Indeed, for a house of its size and location, you would expect a fleet of servants, and there are none. You don’t know how you didn’t notice before.

Has his family hit some financial strife? There’s no bitter pleasure to be found in the realization, regardless of your envy over his privileges when you were younger. Was this the confession burning in his throat? Was he waiting for you to ask?

But, then, you remember: family. You keep thinking about John’s _family_. Except that you know he has no wife, and there are no children. The windows outside are all dark.

There is no one else in this entire house.It is merely John, alone, with the warmth of his smile filling up an entire room.

* * *

He makes you tea, again. You don’t know what to say to him. In the wake of your revelation, you want to say so many things, but none of them feel right.

You don’t know how to broach the topic, but you also don’t feel comfortable ignoring it. As you sit together, mulling it over, trying to find the words, you come to realize John seems different as well.

Though he still seems happy to see you, he also seems shaky, almost pained. As if a burden seems to weigh on him, pushing down and down until he seems almost as diminished as his house, half the man you knew.

It’s too much. You can’t bear it.

“John,” you say, finally. As gently as you are able. “What happened?”

He jolts at the sound of your voice. He’d been staring down at his cup, which you know to be empty, but when he looks up at you he seems almost confused. As if he had somehow fallen asleep, or forgotten you were there.

For a few moments he seems conflicted, fidgeting as he did the other night, biting his lip in the silence.

You wait.

“My father died, you see,” John murmurs, after a while. “Two years ago. I don’t know if I’ve… Sorry, I don’t know if I’ve really been myself since then.”

Though you suspected such, given your observations, the truth still makes your chest go tight to hear.

“I’m sorry,” you say, though you know it’s not enough. You’re not sure anything could be enough.

But he nods in quiet acknowledgement, and continues. “I assume you’re talking about the house though? It’s seen better days, that’s for sure,” he says. “Didn’t take long for it to start falling apart without him here.”

You never met John’s father. Maybe you would have, if you’d taken one of John’s invitations to visit him at home when you were younger. It’s too late now; the least you can do is listen.

“He cared a lot about that kind of thing. Keeping it nice. Not to show off, he wasn’t like that. I think he wanted to make me feel proud of where I came from? But without him here… I just don’t really care.”

You’ve never heard his voice like this; soft, even, almost dreamlike. He glances from you to the floor often, as if he doesn’t know what to expect from you, and it scares him.

You, who come from nothing.

But you don’t feel nothing. In fact, you feel a terrible ache in your chest for him, a wrenching pain for the loss of a man you didn’t even know.

Unfortunately, loss is something you do know, intimately, and your thoughts flash to your guardian, your eldest brother dead since your childhood. The last of your family. Given the tremble in John’s hands as he speaks, you imagine his grief is a mirror to your own, and for an instant you almost reach out to touch him.

“Do you think about death?” he asks, abruptly.

You keep your hand to yourself.

“It’s all I can think about these days, ever since he died. Is that strange?”

Probably, you think. “No,” you say.

In this, you two are the same. Death drives everything you do. You’ve never told anyone that. You’ve never let anyone close enough to dare.

But you want to try.

“To be honest with you, I think it’s been the same for me, I…”

You stop, because vulnerability doesn’t come easily to you, but John gazes at you expectantly, not only as if he cares but that he finds it rude that you’d withhold anything worth saying to him.

You want to laugh at the absurdity of it all, but instead you tell him the truth. That everything you’ve built has been driven by a desire to create in the face of loss. That you work every day and night to fill your home with light and sound and energy, a facsimile of life in the absence of the real thing.

You’ve spent much of your life alone. People are difficult, machines are not.

At some point while you were talking he stopped watching you, but he no longer seems dazed or nervous. Instead, he appears deep in thought, and you wonder what part of your rambling inspired that look in his eyes.

Without warning, he asks, “What would you do, if nothing could stop you?”

That’s a dangerous question; one you don’t answer.

“What would you _build_?” John stresses, after a moment.

You take a breath, as though giving it some thought, but you already know the answer.

“A machine,” you say slowly. “One that doesn’t just record the world around us but… One that could capture a mind. An imprint, if you will? The map of a soul. I’ve been curious about it for a long time, if it would be possible. But in reality I couldn’t even begin to describe the costs of developing it, testing it, the risk involved to the subject…”

“Also,” you add, because this detail is quite important, “I suspect it would be highly illegal.”

When you look up, John’s staring at you openly again, his wide eyes so very blue.

“That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard,” he says, but you don’t even flinch from it, because it’s John. There’s nothing mocking in his tone. In fact, the look he’s giving you is more impressed than anything else. Startled, even confused, but awed as well.

He’s thinking again. You can practically see the cogs turning in his head, just like you always have. When he moves, it’s to stare up at the tall ceilings of the sitting room, gesturing around, as if indicating the entire house.

“I hate this,” he says. “I really hate all of this. I don’t even care if it falls apart, it’s felt like a trap more than a home since he died.”

You understand. You understand better than you think you could ever say.

“I thought… I’ve thought about just leaving,” he admits, sounding defeated. “I don’t care about selling the house. I don’t need the money and my projects—well, it’s all been stalled—”

He stammers here, just for a moment, which is the only reason why it catches your attention. What projects?

“—So the idea of just getting on a ship, or a train, picking a direction and going as far as I could… I think I was going to do it, until I saw you in town.”

Your heart is pounding, yet the world around you seems to slow down and stop entirely as John levels you with his eyes again.

“That’s a lot to take in,” you say, swallowing hard around everything else you want to say and won’t.

 _Why_ , you think. _Why me?_

Something has shifted in the air between you. It feels dangerous. It feels much like standing at the edge of the cliffs by your home in Derse, and the stillness that would overtake you as you stared down at the ocean waves, knowing you could never survive the fall.

And how it never stopped you from wanting to jump.

“Can I show you something?” John asks you softly, in that stillness.

You take a breath. You jump.

“Yes,” you say. “Of course.”

* * *

Maybe you should have known, should have put it together from the pieces right in front of your eyes. You knew what he was, and you knew he was hiding something from you. Something he wanted you to see.

And indeed, now you see.

The basement is cavernous and dark, despite a low hum of electricity. You don’t need lamps to make out long rows of worktables littered with instruments of glass and metal, or the piles of books overflowing with handwritten notes. You’ve seen labs before, but none like this; none so foreboding and cold like a tomb, lit from every angle by tanks and long, coiled tubes of softly glowing sea-green plasma.

It’s beautiful. It’s so, so beautiful, you can hardly stop yourself from walking towards the tanks closest to you, even as you see what they contain.

Bodies; small, still bodies, held in perfect suspension within each glowing tank. Rabbits, mostly, and a few rats. You’ve seen death before, and you know you’re looking at it now, but you don’t feel afraid. Dead things never looked asleep to you, no matter what stories would say, but these do. It’s almost hypnotic.

“Is this ectobiology, then?” you ask, unblinking.

“Something like that,” John says evasively. In your peripheral vision, you see how he looks around. “This whole space actually used to be the servant’s quarters,” he adds, and his tone shifts to something almost conversational, as though you were still making smalltalk in the sitting room. “I let them all go after, well. You know.”

You think he’s nervous, maybe already regretting his decision to bring you down here. After all, you don’t need to be told that this lab is most certainly an unauthorized one. You recognize homemade equipment when you see it; your own house is full of the same.

As he joins you by the tanks, however, you’re less certain. Nervous may not be the word; he seems quite animated, cheery even, his lips curving in a pleased smile as he looks between you and his work.

Something changed, between one level of his house and the next.

It was a tense, quiet walk as he led you through formerly fine halls, past the kitchen and down narrow and narrower stairs. As you descended with him alone into some cold, dark space below his house, you wondered if you should feel afraid, but you didn’t. Not even as you passed boarded cellar windows, or the threshold of a reinforced door thicker than your body. Opening and closing it behind you was no small feat; you watched as his arms strained to move it, felt the floor tremble as it slammed shut.

You should have been afraid then, much in the way John should be afraid now, and all he does as gaze at you in the growing quiet.

“I have this idea,” he says to you, after a time. He swallows, as if his throat were dry. “But I think they’d hang me if I did it.”

You, having committed at least one kind of hanging offense, the kind typically committed in private corners of dimly lit bars and back alleys, find your shoulders relaxing in the face of John’s own criminality.

“They hang men for all kinds of things,” you say, a grim laugh running through the words. “Not always for good reason.”

John laughs with you, though there’s nothing really funny about it. You doubt he fully understands your meaning anyway, and laughter seems to be the only thing to pierce the tension building between the two of you, in this dark and strange place.

He really does seem different than he did upstairs, no longer diminished and unsteady, but he’s stalling. You still don’t know why he wanted to bring you here, why it was so important for you to see this lab, when all it does is make you a witness.

“Tell me about your work, John,” you prompt him, when his laughter subsides. You let exasperation slip into the command of your voice, but it’s just for show. You can tell he likes it, that it amuses him, because being bossed about by someone as below his station as you are apparently frees him from any last reservations.

His smile lingers for a moment or two longer, almost fond enough to distract you from the matter at hand, but as it fades he grows serious.

“What do you know about ectobiology?” he asks.

It’s been a while since university, but your conversation the other night did help refresh your memory. You tell him what you remember, that it relates to the removal, reformation, and reintegration of cells in the body. That when used in medicine, blood, tissue and organs can be turned into blank slates, virtually reengineered.

You know it’s rare, practically otherworldly, and John nods along to every word. His gaze slips from you, studying the contents of the tank with such focus that he seems unaware of how you, in turn, study him.

“After my father died,” he says, his voice growing distant once more, “I buried myself in research. At the hospital, we’re only allowed to use ectology for grafts and transplants, in risky procedures where there aren’t a lot of options. But it’s powerful, you know? It can do so much.”

Considering that it’s a highly guarded field of study, one in which only the best educated and most skilled are allowed to participate in, yes. You don’t have to be an ectobiologist yourself to imagine how powerful it must be, and how dangerous.

He glances back at you, with a grim, determined look on his face like you’ve never seen, and your heartbeat quickens.

“So, I’ve been experimenting with other uses. For, um, a while. These little guys, well… I got them from the university labs, after they died—and I’ve been trying to bring them back.”

On reflex, you shake your head. You whisper, “John,” in protest, though you have no idea what else could possibly follow. You almost think you’re being gentle, a voice of reason to snap him from this grief-stricken madness, but you don’t get the chance.

“I know what it sounds like,” he says urgently, and presses his hand to the glass. “But Dirk—I’ve done it. It works. I swear. Let me show you something?”

He stares at you, eyes wide and imploring, and you know at least one thing: he’s not lying to you. Not on purpose, maybe not at all. You find the same thing in his eyes you did the first night you came here, the eager desperation for you to see him, his work, and to understand. To share everything he’s kept hidden from the world in this cold, dark basement.

From the world, but not from you.

When you’ve had a chance to breathe, to not recoil in denial and confusion, John guides you close, even indicates for you to touch the glass of the tank. You hadn’t dared, before.

“Do you feel it?” he murmurs.

You close your eyes with a shiver. You do. You feel something through the glass you don’t know how to name; it’s cold, as cold as ice against your palm, but it doesn’t hurt. The hum of electricity you felt in the air the moment you entered the lab seems to emanate from the liquid in the tanks, a buzzing tingle you can practically feel throughout your entire body. You’ve never felt anything like it.

They do not decay in this state, John tells you softly; some of them have been dead for over a year. Almost as if they’re waiting. Waiting for him to get it right.

You look again, searching, and to you they truly seem asleep.

With your heart pounding, you let your hand fall away from the tank. He doesn’t seem to mind, nor that you continue to stand close to him, letting his proximity ground you.

“You said—your work is stalled,” you say eventually, with the stillness broken. Your throat feels tight, and you swallow against it. “What’s going wrong?”

As if snapping out of a daze, John shrugs with a loud sigh. His arm falls away from the tank, and you try not to jump as his knuckles brush yours.

“I’m not lying when I say it works. But I can’t get it to—stick,” he admits, brows furrowed. “They come back for a day, at most a week. Then their organs start failing and I have to put them back in the tank, start all over.”

For the time being, you set aside the madness of it all, and let yourself think.

“You said they’re lab rabbits, aren’t they? Is it possible they’re just too sick?”

John looks at you, grinning in a way you know to be vaguely patronizing, but again you see that flash of exhaustion that runs through him over and over.

“Jeez, Dirk, you think that hadn’t occurred to me?” he laughs. “Stripping out cancer cells, reversing degeneration—that’s the easy part. That’s the core of my work.”

It should infuriate you, how great his ego has grown, to speak of such an accomplishment so flippantly, but it doesn’t sound like much of a boast. He sounds more disappointed than anything. 

“I still can’t keep them alive,” he says, sighing. “I can rebuild healthy tissue and organs, but over and over again the failure comes from the nervous system. Ectobiologically engineered cells don’t conduct current in the same way, which isn’t a problem with a living patient and a functioning brainstem to pick up the slack. But—”

He stops, taking a breath, where you feel yours trapped in your chest. “I think if I could produce another source of electricity—maybe even something that _stays_ in the body, implanted—”

And this is the moment where you truly understand. He really has been following your work.

John trails off, biting his lip again, as anxious as you’ve ever seen him.You don’t know what to say. You barely blink, gazing back at him as he waits.

You have so much power here, and you feel it intensely. The _one thing_ you’ve known about ectobiology above all else is that its practices are closely regulated and monitored for precisely the malpractice John is committing. With the right resources, the right tools, any lunatic could apparently become some backyard necromancer.

Which is, coincidentally, what John seems to have become.

You could blackmail him, you think, almost dizzily. You could leverage John for every comfort he was born into and you were denied. You could report him to the Queensguard and wash your hands of the entire mess.

You think of these things because you can’t help it; survival has been all that you’ve known for a long time. But you know with the same dizzying intensity you will do none of those things, and not simply out of some sense of schoolboy loyalty.

This is real. You see it in his eyes, in the tanks glowing with that strange ectoplasma. You feel that spark in your chest again to look at him, and you know it now for what it is. A familiar rush of inspiration, warm and heady; an urgent drive to build and to work. You recognize it as the same drive that you felt at the height of your school rivalry every time you even glanced in John’s direction.

How could you have forgotten? Looking back on it, you know it was a pivotal part of your life at that time. Maybe you didn’t want to remember, but it doesn’t matter, because the longer John stares at you in breathless, frozen hope, the greater that sense grows.

You think again of the cliffside, the exhilaration and fear, standing all alone at the edge of the world.

But in this place, you’re not alone, and neither is he.

* * *

It’s morning when you make it back to your rented room. You fall asleep with the sun pouring across your bed, your mind as quiet as the streets below your window.

You miss the rest of your appointments that week, and the train for Derse leaves without you on it.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _He takes her apart. He takes several of them apart. Disassembly, reassembly, made possible through ectobiology._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> halloween double feature!! :3c 
> 
> (and a little reminder here about the "medical experimentation" tag... it's only going to get darker from here, y'all)

Click through for the fullsize illustration, art by @[kodoukat](https://www.instagram.com/kodou.kat.13/)!

* * *

You learn a great deal about ectobiology, over the next few months.

It’s thrilling. You, with nothing more than a formal academic expulsion to your name, privy to the most closely guarded secrets of a rare, exotic science simply because John wishes you to know it. He’s an open book to you; his notes, his devices, everything hidden in this strange lab is at your disposal.

You make use of it all to absorb what you can, but mostly, you watch him work.

In watching, you learn that John has limits; he can’t rework bone, only soft tissue, and it has to be in the best possible condition when it goes into the ectologic solution for his use. The fresher the organic material, the more successful the resulting assembly. He demonstrates this to you with organs, pilfered from the university labs and butcher shops, and eventually with one of the rabbits.

It’s a fruitless attempt, and you know it before he begins. He brought you here to bridge the gap in his experiments, to accomplish with your machinery what he can’t with ectology. To do that, you have to witness where he fails, to better understand how.

It’s difficult to observe, but not for the reasons that you thought it would be. You’re familiar with death and clinical dissection, and familiar now with the grim if mundane reality of much of his work here. It’s easy to view the process objectively. You feel like a student again, making notes at each step of the process in your own shorthand as he takes the rabbit from the solution, cleans and prepares her, and wires her up to various machines.

Once the machinery begins to hum, however, your notes stop short. There’s a current crackling all around you, one that builds in intensity until you can see arcs of electricity coiling between components, machine noise roaring in your ears, in your head. John seems unsurprised, unbothered, even as the machines and the lights cut off, leaving the two of you bathed in nothing but that familiar sea green glow.

 _No_ , you realize, in the aftermath.

There are three of you. Three.

On the table, you watch as convulsive jolts turn to movement. Conscious movement. Ears flick in the low light, curious and searching. Her chest rises and falls.

You think you whisper his name. You feel your mouth move but the noise in your head only grows louder, until it abruptly stops, and in the rush of silence you can hear the sound of nails clicking against the metal of the table.

The rabbit rolls, sitting upright on all four legs, as placidly as if waking up from a nap. She seems alert, but unafraid, as she doesn’t startle when John approaches, petting her gently, and removing the cables connected to her.

You watch all of this, unblinking. You don’t move.

“Sorry,” he says, but not to you; his voice is almost cheery, the perfect bedside manner for a doctor removing a small needle from his patient’s forearm.

You stare until your eyes burn, and he barely looks in your direction.

“How long was she dead?” you ask, after a while. Your voice is little more than a whisper, and he’s so calm.

John takes off his work gloves to pet her in earnest, and tells you she was one of the first he brought home, well over a year ago.

You don’t know what else you can say. The rabbit moves around on the table as if she hasn’t spent more than a year in a basement, floating in some unnatural glowing ectoplasm. Your mind reels, and your notes lay on the floor, virtually forgotten.

It’s terrifying, you think. It was. For a moment you almost reconsider calling the Queensguard on this whole endeavor, but your heart is pounding, and you don’t feel afraid, not in the way you probably should. Awed, perhaps, that John could command such a power, that he could unmake death, and spend the aftermath humming to himself, idly playing with the creature he’s brought to life.

“I hate this part,” he confesses to you then, interrupting your thoughts. You look up from his hands on her fur to see his pained expression. “She won’t last. I’ve brought her back a few times.”

“Oh,” you say, numbly. “Of course.”

After a little while, he puts her back to sleep. He doesn’t want to wait days, not when he knows what will happen, what always happens.

But not next time, you think. You’re here now.

* * *

When you feel that you understand the steps you need to take, which of your designs could be applied to John’s strange science, John gives you half of his lab. You outfit it at no expense to yourself; John allows you to acquire everything you need without question, signing off on payments with barely a glance at the number. It’s a carelessness of wealth that you might resent, if he didn’t smile at you as he did it, his fond gaze nothing but trusting, every single time.

The only time you even openly discuss your purchases at all is when you express concern that his well-to-do neighbors might notice the flurry of activity, that they might question deliveries of crates and mechanical equipment to a house that has seen far better days.

Attention, after all, is the last thing either of you want to fall on your work here.

To your surprise, John laughs. It’s a soft chuckle from across the lab, but he seems to find your question very funny.

“Oh, yeah—I’ve been telling a few people I’m playing patron to an _up and coming_ inventor in town. Everyone just seems relieved I have a hobby now, I guess,” he says with another laugh, and your face warms, despite the cool air in the lab. “It’s not really a lie though, right? That’s why you came back to Prospit, after all.”

John says it so confidently, without question or doubt. He shoots you a pleased grin before he goes back to what he was doing, while you stare quietly down at your hands.

He’s not wrong, you suppose. Mostly.

You came to Prospit for investors, plural hopefully; you didn’t intend on becoming a singular wealthy patron’s…pet inventor. You can’t argue that it’s a useful explanation, one that his society acquaintances would be unlikely to question. You can’t even deny that he’s given you money personally, though you only took enough to eat and pay for your room by the docks for a few months in advance.

He offered you more, but you didn’t take it. If you actually let yourself think that was how John saw you—as nothing but an employee, an underling at his beck and call, you’d already be long gone.

Instead, over the last few weeks, you’ve only grown entrenched into John’s work, coming to find it as compelling a puzzle as he does.

John told you to make yourself at home in his fine house, and you did, in all ways but one. Though you increasingly spend most of your time there at the lab—often twelve or even eighteen hours at a stretch, at the end of it you take the long walk back to the docks to sleep.

Something John finds outrageous, and frequently reminds you.

“You can stay at the house, you know!” he says, at least every other day. “There’s twenty bedrooms, Dirk, you can have any of them you want.”

You doubt that. But it’s fine, you tell him; you like the walk.

Or at least, you like that by the time you reach your thin, rented mattress, the walk has left you tired enough to escape the sharp edges of your thoughts. Without that, you spend too many nights sleepless, thinking of your unfinished, unsolved work in the lab and John, John, John.

As if you need to catch up for lost time, all those years where you didn’t think about him at all.

Sometimes it doesn’t seem to matter how long you walked, or how long you worked. Alone with your thoughts in the earliest hours of the morning, too tired to fight it, but too awake to sleep, you can do nothing but reflect and wonder.

Days and weeks have gone by, and still John’s words return to you in the dark.

“Will you help me?” he asked you, that night, whispered in that secret place. “No one challenges me, not like you did. Maybe we can solve this, if we work together. We could build something new.”

Something new. You’d like that.

You lost your family long ago, and there aren’t many ways to create one outside the biological. You’re not the marrying kind, despite your keen hunger for it. To love. To be loved. There will be no family, no children, not for you.

You didn’t tell him any of that, when you agreed to stay. You’d never dare. You barely admit it to yourself, outside of these dark, lonely moments. That there is nothing for you but this. To design, to build—to help John create life from death, and that it’s all you want.

* * *

At the lab, you never feel alone. The work keeps your hands and mind occupied, and it comes to almost feel more like home than your old family house in Derse. You’ve grown used to the animals in their suspended rest, the hum of the ectological equipment, even during John’s long absences. He splits his time away at the hospital, working regularly enough to maintain his position there and the access it gives him.

In the beginning, he used it to introduce you to the chemicals and compounds he regularly alchemizes for his work—and later, to bring you descriptions and hastily drawn schematics of the machines he needs to work. He’s tried to replicate many of them on his own, to at least some degree of success, as you’ve seen, though their imperfections limit him.

“But you can make them better,” he says to you. “Can’t you?”

The components of his machines are sensitive, complex mechanisms made of rare materials—far beyond what you could have ever made in your own workshop in Derse. He thinks highly of your skills, and you feel compelled to prove him right.

It takes a little while, but eventually you do. The project accelerates; propelled on by your labors, and John’s ceaseless energy and focus with the work.

You don’t sleep much, these days. You have no idea when or where John does either, frankly. He’s usually gone during the day, which is when you catch what sleep you do get across town. By the time you’ve returned to the house, he’s back from the hospital to let you in through the servant’s entrance—your idea, one he permits, though he makes no attempt to hide his own displeasure at some perceived insult to you.

And regardless of how much or how little you managed to sleep, or if John did at all, the two of you work until the morning once again. You do this every night, for weeks that turn into months, until you have a prototype ready for implantation, and he has a subject ready to be revived once again.

You are not a creature of hope. You never have been. You’re too pragmatic for that; you plan, and you prepare, but you don’t know how to hope.

But even in the absence of hope, failure tastes bitter.

In this, you know John is much the same as you. He’s failed in his experiments a dozen times, maybe more, but this failure isn’t like the rest. It isn’t his alone. You bear it too, and it stings.

She lasts longer than she ever has before, but it’s not enough. After a week, even you know the device inside her is failing, and John puts her back to sleep before the deterioration becomes too great.

It’s a somber affair. Afterwards, when the silence feels deafening between you, you’re still at a loss for what to say. You don’t know how to read his mood, and you wonder if you’ve at last disappointed him.

“I’m sorry,” you say eventually. “But… I have some ideas for how I can fix the design. We can try again, when you’re ready.”

Nothing. John gazes into the tank, as if he didn’t hear you at all.

“I think you were right,” he says, distantly. “Maybe… Maybe they are too sick.”

You shake your head, and your fingers ache to curl around his shoulder.

“John…”

“It’s okay, Dirk. Really.” He turns around to face you, smiling, and you shiver. “I have another idea.”

* * *

He takes her apart. He takes several of them apart. Disassembly, reassembly, made possible through ectobiology.

John finds what he can use, what parts he can rewrite and reconfigure, and you help him. You don’t have to be asked. You build joints, capacitors, and improve upon your implant devices as he works to keep the new body from rejecting them.

You believed him, when he told you he could bring life back into the tiny bodies in the lab. You believed it when you felt the energy coming from the tanks; otherworldly, beyond your understanding.

And you believed that you could help him, because he believed it too.

No one has ever looked at you the way John looks at you. You know he often finds you difficult, even baffling, when your nature is so frustratingly contrary to his own. But despite it all, he sees something in you.

You want to be worthy of that gaze. You want to show him that his respect for you—his _trust_ in you—is not misplaced.

You work longer and longer hours. Sometimes you don’t return to your room by the docks at all, in favor of falling asleep at your work table for an hour or two at a time. Once you wake to John’s hand on your shoulder, gently shaking, but not to compel you back to work. He looks as exhausted as you feel, his eyes red lined, almost bruised.

“Get some real sleep,” he implores. “I mean it.”

You shake your head. You hurt everywhere, but you can’t even imagine leaving. “We’re close,” you whisper.

He gives you that look again, that mix of disbelief at your stubbornness and utter fondness, and eventually he nods. You get back to work.

You know now that John’s machines don’t simply electrify the body, miraculously jolting it back to life after months, years. Electricity is part of it, but in John’s experiments and now yours, you’ve come to see how little time that grants for a single subject.

And your experiment is no longer a single subject. You don’t yet know how to describe what you’ve built—what you’ve _created_ —together, but to most eyes, she’s still a rabbit. There are new components that glint under patches of mismatched fur, metal seams demarcating where parts of each body begin and end. There are stitches now that run the leylines of her new form, some that hide your contributions, the device you’ve built that he grafted to her heart with care.

When the day comes to try again, you watch with your breath held tight through every step. As before, John connects her methodically to each of his machines, and the process begins again. The machines roar as they engage and build power, electrifying an inert ectological solution he alchemized that, in turn, becomes part of her blood, turning it deep purple, almost blue.

From there, the spark of life comes with the flip of a switch. You barely blink, even when the lights go out again under the deafening crackle of electricity.

You need to fix that, you think, feeling unsteady in the ensuing darkness. The wiring—that’s one thing you can fix, one thing you can do for him, if you fail at everything else. If your skills are not what you believed them to be, what John believed them to be. You can fix broken things; metal things, lifeless things.

In the silence, the sudden sound of claws skittering to life against the metal table isn’t a surprise this time, though you feel flooded with relief all the same.

Standing beside you, out of the corner of your eye, you see John smile.

* * *

The days pass you in a strange, restless blur. You know you make it back to your room to sleep at some point, but the rest of the time is spent with John, monitoring your small creation for any sign of deterioration.

The failure of your previous device weighs on you, but this attempt is nothing like the one before. _She_ is nothing like she was before; no longer one thing, one life. She’s the product of so many lives and deaths, now pieced together, and she’s the culmination of your time, energy, and dreams—both yours and John’s.

You don’t want it to have been for nothing. Not when you’ve both worked so hard, and come so close. You feel the days pass by slowly, torturously, and though you’re tense with anxiety nearly every passing moment, John seems relatively calm. He’s been at this longer than you, and perhaps failure has inured him to the agony of waiting. He watches her, gently pets and tends to her much the same as before—and, eventually, something does feel different.

You haven’t forgotten what happened last time, how she weakened within days before the end. It hurt to watch, to wait. This time, you can see that she is no longer dying in slow motion, as they have in the past. She’s alive, truly alive. The device is still operational, her organs are functioning, and she begins recovering strength. Slowly at first, and then quite fast; by the end of the week she seems irritated with the limitations of her cage in the lab, prompting John to set her up in a much larger one, positively beaming as she makes herself at home in it.

He turns that gaze to you as well, sometimes, aglow with pride and fondness. You don’t have the heart to tell him to stop, to tell him why he shouldn’t, so you do your best not to notice.

Everything feels different, now. The lab is quiet most days, absent the sounds of machinery and work, but you still spend a great deal of time there anyway. You half-heartedly plot designs and improvements for the device, passing the hours talking to John and watching your shared creation grow comfortable in her new life, as if she might disappear if you look away for even a moment.

John is different too, you think. But maybe different isn’t the right word for it. If anything, he feels—familiar. He feels more like the John you remember from school, lively and teasing, that you’ve seen only in flashes since you’ve returned to Prospit.

Over the hours, the two of you discuss names. It feels wrong not to name her, but the notion presents an interesting quandary that you go back and forth on endlessly. She is one rabbit now, but she was built from many. John points out they all had different names, and the subject of conversation drifts into philosophizing about what it means for her resulting identity.

It reminds you of being in school together; John clearly forgot how you loved to argue, how you interrogate an idea and strip it down, and you forgot how much you loved to watch him roll his eyes and huff with frustration as you go on.

She’s not human, you argued. She doesn’t know she’s a composite. She doesn’t know what her body _should_ look like, what it _should_ be made of, only what it is. She may not know she ever existed in any other form.

“I like to think of her as more of a _composition_ ,” he interrupts, and laughs when you, in turn, roll your eyes at him.

“Duly noted,” you say. As he doesn’t disagree with your points beyond semantics, you continue, and make the case for naming her after the rabbit whose head he used in the final experiment, grim as it may be. To you, that seems the closest to any sense of identity she could have.

John doesn’t argue or tease you, he merely hums, chewing his lower lip as he thinks.

“I suppose we could,” he says. “The thing is, bringing anything to life like this—it’s not really the same as reviving the life that existed before. Even if she could remember. She’s something new now, entirely.”

That’s right. She is something new; something the two of you created, together. Your heart flutters in your chest, and you mull over his words for a while.

“How about Liv?”

John smiles at you, delighted. “Liv it is.”

* * *

The period of relief and euphoria that follows your success feels brutally short lived. You ride it as long as you can, but eventually uncertainty begins to gnaw at you, no longer knowing where you fit in this world.

The reason you came to Prospit feels distant and alien to you now. You don’t imagine how you could pick up where you left off, chasing prospective investors after spending months nearly vanished from society, helping John crack his impossible puzzle in complete disregard for any laws of man or nature.

And you did it; you helped him, you built the missing piece, you’ve undone death together— you’ve created _life_ together—and now you don’t know where that leaves you. With what you’ve made, what you’ve shown him, you know that John can surely continue on without you, if he wanted to.

Is that what you’re expecting? That he will thank you for your contribution and send you back to Derse, or worse, mail you a check for your work, as if that’s all this ever was?

Sometimes you don’t leave your bed by the docks for a day or two at a time, telling yourself you’re catching up on sleep, but you think you’re scared to face him. The more days pass, the more your dread and uncertainty grows. With the work done, you can’t imagine what use he now has for you, and it’s wearing you down.

You don’t want to leave, but you need a reason to stay.

Even so, you can’t hide away from him forever, if you could even want to. After nearly a week away, you return to the house, and find he’s left the servant’s entrance unlocked for you.

Given the nature of the crimes hidden under the floorboards of this house, you know you ought to be annoyed with him, but instead you just smile.

“That’s dangerous, you know,” you say, as you let yourself into the lab. “Anyone could just walk in here.” You suspected you might find him working, and indeed you do, but he drops everything to stand when you come in.

“ _There_ you are!” he exclaims, to your surprise. “I was starting to get worried. I went looking for you all over by the docks and thought I found you but—Dirk, you didn’t even leave me the name of your hotel.”

You hadn’t; mostly because that building barely qualifies as a hotel, and you couldn’t exactly imagine having John around for tea in it. Even the thought that he might have seen you on the street outside of it makes you feel slightly ashamed, but mostly you’re stunned at the strength of his reaction. You don’t even know what to say, and in the silence he grows sheepish.

“I thought you could be hurt,” he admits. “Or—that you’d left.”

The hurt is there in his voice, and the confusion, and it twists you inside because you know you considered it. He looks tired, as if he’d been up all night. You know the look. You wonder if he’s gone back to work, or if he truly has been that worried about you, and not just worried you’d gone to the Queensguard. It’s difficult to imagine. 

“No,” you say. Not yet. You take a breath, and try not to shy away from his gaze. “But… John, I came back to tell you there’s a train to Derse, next week. I thought, if you don’t—require me here anymore…”

You trail off, uncertain, even though he says nothing. You’ve always been able to read him like a book, but you have no idea how to read the expression that crosses his face now. He looks _lost_.

“Dirk…” he breathes, and runs a hand against the nape of his neck. “I don’t get it. Why wouldn’t I?”

You don’t have a response to that, really. Your eyes dart to Liv’s cage, where she bounds around in the fittest of health, and you don’t know what else you could offer here. Some suggestions, refinements for the design at best, but beyond that?

After a moment, you see that he’s followed your gaze, and his expression grows distant as he watches her. Distant, thoughtful, but not cold.

“Can I tell you something?” he asks, and your throat feels tight as you nod.

He takes another breath, deep and steadying.

“Sometimes… Sometimes I think I died when my father died,” he admits to you, softly. “The world stopped feeling real—like everything since that moment has been a dream.”

You came here to say goodbye, and now you feel rooted to the spot. Even more when he turns back towards you, fixing you with that soft blue gaze.

“But this—what we’ve done, it feels real.”

It does. It feels bigger, grander than anything you have ever made before. You feel your heart in your throat, and you struggle to swallow it down. He’s barely moved towards you, he’s barely moved at all. You feel afraid, but not of him.

“We can do more,” John says. “I feel like together…we can do _so_ much. Don’t you think?”

It’s dangerous, what you’ve been doing here, you know it’s dangerous—not to mention criminal, and likely quite insane—yet you barely hesitate before agreeing.

“Yes,” you tell him, nearly breathless, and are rewarded with that familiar smile, warm and soft with his relief. 

But you’re relieved as well; dizzy with it, because you needed a reason, and now you have one.

* * *

You’re curious, of course you are, that's why you stayed here in the first place, but you know it’s so much more.

You came back to Prospit to secure your future, and yours alone. It’s strange to remember it, to imagine it; those plans seem distant, as though belonging to someone else. But now… All you can think about is that you’ve come this far with him, you’d like to see it through. You’d like to stay, to work, to see where it takes you. Both of you.

He tells you he wants to experiment more, scale the project up in scope and complexity. You’re not sure yet what that looks like, and for a little while you continue making the long trek back to the docks each night, returning in the morning largely to resume your ectobiology studies while you wait for his ideas to take shape.

You don’t exactly know why you decide to finally move into the house; it’s a taxing commute, a waste of time better spent at the lab, but that has been true for months. Maybe you feel differently now, knowing he’s not in a hurry to be rid of you, enough to truly make yourself at home.

Or, close to it, anyway. John seems ecstatic when you tell him you wish to stay at the house, at least at first, until he frowns and fusses in confusion when you simply move your things to a disused corner of the lab.

“This isn’t what I meant, you know!” he chastises, though for you it seems the perfect solution.

“I’m keeping Liv company,” you say dryly, but it gets a laugh out of him, and he drops the matter.

It’s convenient, true, but not much else. The cot is somehow even less welcoming than the old rented mattress across town. You don’t spend a lot of time in it anyway—the important thing is you’re close by, even if…at times…it’s almost as much of a curse as it is a benefit.

Nights become difficult, once you’re living at the house. The thoughts you could keep at bay through working yourself to exhaustion over and over are harder to escape when you sleep mere feet away from your workbench. You toss and turn, watching the door, long past the hour when John finally leaves the lab and goes to bed.

It doesn’t have to be this way. You know you could ask for a room, he’s made that clear enough, but you just can’t imagine it. This feels safer to you, sleeping in servant’s quarters turned into a lab, the discomfort and impermanence of it, like this is where you truly belong. If you were to sleep upstairs, in a guest room in this house…you dread becoming too comfortable, too bold—and it terrifies you, the thought of wanting to ask John for more than he can give you.

This is enough, you tell yourself, this marriage of the minds. You make it true, because you believe it, and you are content. You know that nothing you build alone could ever truly live; it couldn’t feel, it couldn’t breathe, not without John. It’s enough for you to share the same dream, the same roof, to know that John sleeps somewhere above you in this large, nearly empty house, and each night you shut your eyes and let the thought follow you to rest.

And each new day, when he returns to you, he brings things. More extensive books on the different schools of ectology, for you, and more resources for the two of you to work with. Chemicals, tissue, and organs. Though you’ve learned enough to assist with some of the alchemical processes, you primarily test variations on your electrical devices.

Sometimes he tells you what he’d like to try, and you design accordingly; but the longer this new stage of your partnership goes on, the less you require his input. You often feel as though the two of you speak the same language saying nothing at all; he brings you things, and you get to work, building the electrical components that can keep muscles moving, blood pumping, neurons firing.

It’s a strange thing to get used to, you suppose, being brought glowing green jars with once-living things. But you’ve worked with organs before. You started there, testing your first clumsy prototypes on pig and sheep hearts, before working smaller and smaller, until your devices were barely as big as your thumb, small enough to facilitate Liv’s new existence.

Except, as of late, the organs that John brings you are not from the butcher shop, not from the university. They’re human, diseased and destined for the incinerator at the hospital, and diverted to your lab instead. It’s some parts unsettling, but equally enthralling, to watch John rework kidneys and lungs, to make them new again, to bring them to life—and to know that you, in turn, will ensure that they stay that way.

You wonder if it’s practice; a test of your ability, or his own. You don’t often discuss it, what you could do with this unfortunate pile of spare parts, without a system to connect it to, a body to house it. It seems an intellectual exercise at best, but you’re as curious as he is to see what you can accomplish, with this merger of flesh and metal, how far you could go.

And one day, he brings you a heart. It’s preserved in a familiar ectological solution, like the others. It’s human, like the others.

Unlike the others, it’s in perfect condition, no sign of distress or disease.

You stare at it for a while in silence, but eventually, you get to work.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> chapter 3 is about 50% done and will be posted soon, just not today 🥺 thank you for reading!!


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “But we can’t just bring someone back to life, remember,” he whispers earnestly. “Not with ectobiology—not when the core of it is removal. We take things and we change them. That’s how it works. You can’t do that do a person’s mind and have them be…who they were.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> did the word count just double? did I have to add another chapter? apparently. I am so sorry but it would not stop expanding RIP 
> 
> thank you again to @[kodoukat](https://www.instagram.com/kodou.kat.13/) for illustrating for me!! 🥺 please don't forget to click through for her work as well. 
> 
> Let love and lust be monstrous.

Click through for the fullsize illustration, art by @[kodoukat](https://www.instagram.com/kodou.kat.13/)!

* * *

For most of your life, you’ve rarely slept long enough to dream, or well enough to remember it even if you do. Nothing about your habits have changed; on your cot in the lab, you sleep for fitful hours here and there, much as you always have, only after working yourself until you can’t anymore.

And yet, as of late, you dream. In fragments, you dream of Derse: the cold dark hills in the countryside, the blue rushing tides of the ocean, your workshop full of abandoned and lifeless creations.

But mainly, you dream of your brother. Dead now for nearly as long as he had been alive. In your waking hours, you’ve long feared you will forget what he looked like, but in your dreams, you never do.

It's how you know something is wrong. You dream of him often, and this time, he is not himself.

He’s just—wrong. His eyes are burning and blue, his body pale and strange, stitched together from wrist to shoulder. Yet despite it all, you know him, he’s still so _familiar_ , familiar enough to make you ache with the recognition. He reaches for you, and you miss him so terribly it startles you awake in confusion, with pain of the loss wrenching in your chest as if you were a child at his grave all over again.

When you wake, the lab has changed around you. For days now, John’s been reorganizing, making room for new supplies and new equipment you’ve built. After the success with Liv, many of the small tanks are now vacant, or have been repurposed, filled with parts much too large for any lab rabbit.

It’s hard not to stare at them, even as John notices you’ve woken up and smiles at you from the center of the room. He’s used to you sleeping in the lab by now, and rarely wakes you. Most of the time, the two of you seamlessly work with and around each other, as if interruptions to sleep or eat are immaterial.

Every other day, you rise and join him, and leave your stray dreams behind in bed to be forgotten. From the way he’s watching you, it’s clear he expects it as well. That today will be like every other day. He’s pleased with himself, and visibly eager for your approval on the changes he’s made.

But this time, you don’t. Your brother’s face persists behind your eyes, weighing you down as heavily as the composite parts that have slowly begun to fill the lab. And none so much as the heart.

You need to talk about the heart. It’s been weeks since he brought it home. The two of you have now nearly rebuilt the lab for what comes next, and he still has not _explained_ to you what comes next.

“Hey, we need to talk,” you say, direct and flat, absent any warmth you might usually let creep into your words. Confused, his smile falls from his face. “The heart… It’s not from the university, is it.”

He doesn’t say anything at first, staring at you with his blue eyes wide. You can tell he knows your meaning, because guilt flashes in his expression, and he worries his lower lip with his teeth.

The silence grows longer, and your chest grows tight. Is he considering lying to you? You, after all this time, and everything you’ve done?

You just need to know. That’s it. You just need to know what he’s done, if you’re going to risk not only your own legacy but your life for this mad experiment, this dream.

“How did you know?” is what he says instead, his troubled gaze turning outright miserable. Before you can answer, he’s already shaking his head. “Of course you knew! I don’t even know why I thought you wouldn’t—”

This isn’t what you expected, and in silence you watch him pace the lab, running a hand through his already disheveled hair. “I don’t feel bad about taking things from the school when they’re done with it, if it’s just going to be destroyed anyway! But I’ve never—I’ve never—”

“John,” you say, and then again, sharply, “ _John_.”

You’ve never addressed him like that. It gets his attention, snapping him out of his spiral, and he takes a deep breath.

“I took it from the operating room,” he says at last, with his shoulders falling, guilt etched into every inch of him. “He died on the table during surgery. He wasn’t my patient—but I heard about it, and I offered to take over the postmortem as a favor.”

“I see,” you murmur, with your mind racing, and your heart steady.

As he continues, John tells you that he saw an opportunity, alone in the operating theater, and removed the heart during the procedure. That he hid his theft, and falsified documents, stamped along by a grateful colleague who didn’t even think to question him.

The patient is long buried now, he says, but the guilt has weighed on him, lingering dread and anxiety from the awful impulse that guided him in the first place. You listen to all he has to say without interruption, watching him closely, and waiting until at last he presses his hands into his face, nearly knocking his glasses onto the floor in the process.

You find your voice, though it feels thready and strange to you. “But you didn’t hurt anyone,” you say, and the room nearly slips out of focus.

“No!” John exclaims, turning to face you. “Of course not.”

“Of course,” you echo. Of course. You take a breath, and let yourself consider what he’s told you.

You think you’re relieved to know the truth. You certainly should be, but it’s hard to know exactly how you feel, with John looking at you that way. Tensed and stricken with worry, you can’t help but wonder how much of his concern is rooted more in your opinion of his actions, his fear that you might now think less of him for what he’s done.

You don’t think less of him, but you’re not happy. Despite all of his wealth, all of his status, you know none of it would matter if the Queensguard found this place—and your fates are entangled now, irrevocably. Even if John could somehow talk or bribe his way out of the noose itself, you certainly couldn’t. With all of his family’s status, John couldn’t even prevent you from being expelled from _school_ , much less—

At the thought, your stomach turns, leaving you feeling sharply ill. If just for a moment. You lean against the sharp edge of a worktable and let it take your weight.

You take a breath, another, and all the while John waits, watching you closely. Anxiously.

“That was dangerous,” you say eventually. “You were lucky this time, but…you could have been caught. _We_ could have been caught, and everything we’ve built here—”

The look on his face stops you, more than anything else. Hopeful, almost, but it vanishes as he comes closer to you, as your words sink in.

“I know,” he says at once. “Dirk, I’m sorry, I really am.”

You believe him. You do. But you don’t get a chance to tell him so.

“I’m not proud of it,” he continues. “He’d been dead an _hour_ and no one knew but me—I didn’t think I’d ever get another chance like that again. His heart was in _perfect_ condition and I didn’t want to risk using something too old or damaged, this is just too important—”

The lab is alway cold, and yet you feel a sharp chill. Your body tenses, breath held tight in your chest, and your dream returns to you in an instant. Your brother’s face, his body remade and reformed from other bodies, piece by piece, and your head throbs.

A question burns in you, a notion you’ve barely let yourself consciously entertain, finding it too unbelievable, too impossible.

In all this time, you’ve been largely content to experiment towards some indefinable goal out of curiosity and your own ambition, a gnawing desire to see what the two of you could create together when challenged by someone with that same drive. It was enough. But now your mind is reeling with questions, a desperation to fill the void of everything you don’t know and haven’t thought to question.

What does he want to make? _What_ is so important? As horrible as it is, you think you know the answer.

It’s been two years since his father died. It’s a long time. Too long, you would think. Yet until recently, the lab was filled with creatures dead almost _exactly_ that long—since John first began to experiment, using ectology to not only rewrite cells, but to rewrite life.

You’ve never been through more than the parlor or the kitchen upstairs. You don’t know what could be hidden beyond that, what could lie in suspension elsewhere in the house.

The enormity of it hits you in waves, heady and rushing. And despite it all—even in spite of his deception, you truly understand. You’re not angry, and you’re not judging him; you would know more than most both the enormity of what he lost, and the helplessness that comes in the face of it.

And what else could be so important? Important enough that John would risk not only his name and his standing, but his entire life if not for love, to claw back what was taken from him when he was powerless to stop it?

You would have given anything to see your brother again.

“John,” you whisper, in the awful growing silence. You don’t even know how to say this, you don’t know how to ask, but you have to try. “I need to know. All of this—everything we’re doing here—are you trying to bring your father back?”

It’s the only thing that makes sense, you’re sure of it. But as soon as the words are out of your mouth, it feels as though the world tilts, that the ocean swallows you whole, sinking to cold and punishing depths.

You are gripped with regret, but it’s much too late.

John doesn’t say anything at all. His face pales in shock, blue eyes swallowed black as he stares at you. Where he had come so close only moments before, hands outstretched to you, imploring you to understand what he had done, he now draws away, as if bitten.

“Wait—” you start, your voice strangled and soft, but he turns away before you can apologize.

He leaves the lab without a word. The heavy basement door hangs open behind him as his footsteps echo up the stairs,and for the first time in this dark place, you feel truly alone.

* * *

You were wrong.

You’ve been wrong before, made mistakes before—some that cost you more dearly than others. Your expulsion from university has hung heavily over you for years, the memory of the long journey back to Derse spent stiff with humiliation and regret.

It was terrible. Yet this is worse. It’s so much worse.

You don’t see John for more than a day. He disappears somewhere into the upper reaches of his labyrinthine house, in halls where you’ve never been. You don’t hear him either, not once, and frequently wonder if he’s left entirely.

Left the house. Left the city. Anything’s possible, you think. He told you that he wanted to, after all. That he nearly did, that he had nothing in his life worth keeping him here—and if he hadn’t seen _you_ —oh, you were so wrong.

You lose track of time, at some point. There is always work to do in the lab, even when he’s away, but mostly you pass the hours in your cot, staring up into the rafters. You often think of going to find him, to apologize, but each time you think he would be better off not seeing you at all. That he might have been better off never having seen you, never having met you…

It’s hard for you to break from the cycle of these thoughts once they start, sick with dread and futility, so you wait. You toss and turn, tend to Liv, and you sleep. You wonder how long you should wait before you give up, and you struggle with the urge to do so before he can return and ask you to leave.

He hid things from you. You haven’t lost sight of that. If you were wrong about his intentions, he might even still be hiding things from you, concealing what he would like to accomplish through your experiments together.

Though, now… At least you know it wasn’t what you thought. None of it was what you thought. Learning the truth—even part of it—had settled something inside you, a twisting and ghastly fear, one you had ignored until you couldn’t anymore.

You thought he had hurt someone. That he had killed someone.

It’s good that you were wrong, you think; it would be monstrous to feel otherwise. Yet in the privacy of your own mind, you can confront a different revelation, that the truth revealed something you almost wish it hadn’t: that it didn’t matter.

That you would have stayed even if he had.

You already believed he had done it, even if you hadn’t confronted it outright, and you just wanted him to admit to it. You know that you had no intention of packing up and leaving no matter what he confessed to you, as long as it was the truth.

And maybe it was all for nothing. Because now, if he asks you to leave, you wonder where you might go. What life you could lead, after this—what life you could even want, in the absence of what you had here.

You would have stayed with him. You wanted to stay. You _want_ to stay.

You close your eyes against your fears, and try to sleep.

* * *

And eventually, he returns to you.

You don’t know what time it is; the lab is nearly always dark, and you’ve barely left your cot since you last saw him. At the sound of his footsteps you sit up, readily meeting his eyes over the expanse of the lab.

Your heart pounds. Your throat feels dry. You’re deeply relieved at the sight of him, but also anxious, and run a hand over your hair as if to hide how disheveled and uncomfortable you feel.

There is so much you’ve wanted to say, and yet none of it feels right. All you can do is watch him as he crosses the room towards you. He doesn’t appear upset anymore, though his face is unusually guarded.

In all the time you’ve known him, John always been nothing but open with you, and it stings.

You wanted to apologize for the other day. It has been gnawing at you, until you were nearly ill from it, and yet, strangely—to look at him again, you know that’s not what you need to do. You doubt he’s expecting it, either.

Because as you search his face, you think that he is studying you as well. Taking your measure, as if he is no longer sure of it.

Maybe that’s fair. You certainly misjudged his.

“The other day,” he begins, soft and cautious. “You said something—like you were asking if I had hurt someone.”

 _Ah_.

“Did you really think I had?”

From the tone of his voice, you know the answer is unlikely to be anything he wants to hear. Yet, as you expect the truth from him, you can only offer the same in return.

“Yes,” you admit, equally soft. “I did.”

John accepts this with a nod, his throat working around a hard swallow. You do almost apologize then; you’ve never been very good with people, but you know you’ve made a mistake, and it hurt him.

But unexpectedly, he steps closer, so you say nothing. His face is troubled—brow furrowed, his mouth pulled into a concerned frown, one you know to be thoughtful.

And it’s not aimed at you.

“Do you think I’m capable of that?” he asks you, then, sounding distant. “I made mistakes, back in surgery. I’ve lost patients. And I know the things I’ve done here—they’re not _right_ —but I’ve never… I never thought of myself as the kind of person who could do that? Who could hurt someone on purpose.”

You nod, as he speaks. Maybe you misunderstood his intentions before, but you know him well enough to know what he’s truly asking here.

“I don’t think you’re a monster, John,” you murmur. You move to stand, needing to meet his gaze. He doesn’t flinch away, so you continue. “I didn’t think you hurt someone for fun, not for money. I wasn’t thinking clearly,” you add, somewhat carefully, as close to an apology as you’ll allow yourself.

After all, he had indeed committed a crime—one that apparently shamed him more than any other concealed in this unnatural place, just not the crime you thought.

“What we’ve done here… It’s important. I misunderstood why, but—” Here you sigh, very quietly. “I’ve always thought of you as one of the most capable men I’ve ever met.”

The kind of man who could do anything, who could be anything, if he wanted it enough, you think dazedly. Given the situation, you know he won’t find it flattering, but it’s not an insult. It’s the sincerest compliment you could give. You think highly of him, you always have—even when you hated him.

And were you that far off? You look at him before you, a surgeon and a scientist, a man well acquainted with the power of life over death long before he came to build this lab and share it with you.

John thinks for a while, in silence. If your words make him uncomfortable, it doesn’t show in his expression. When he finally looks at you, he squints curiously for a moment, but then his shoulders fall, and he exhales heavily. As if relieved of some burden you couldn’t quite see.

“I wasn’t sure you’d still be here,” he admits to you. “I was afraid to come down and see that all of your stuff was gone, if you thought…”

His voice softens as he trails off, and you say nothing. Not about that. You’re not going anywhere, that much is clear. Maybe you both truly understand that now.

While you no longer fear he might ask you to leave, your chest still feels tight, weighed down by burdens that you cannot release as easily as he.

Maybe it would be best to let it go. To let your mistake pass unspoken between you, as so many other things have before—but then, that was the problem in the first place, wasn’t it?

You can’t let it go.

“What I said before,” you start. “About your father, I—”

John raises a hand. “Don’t, please,” he says. “It’s okay. I shouldn’t have left like that anyway. I just—needed to think.”

It’s not exactly relief that runs through you, yet for a moment, you still feel weightless. You watch him as that familiar thoughtful look clouds his expression, blue eyes darting around. He glances from you to the floor, a hand pressed to the nape of his neck. He sighs.

“Sorry, this is hard,” he says. “But I understand why you would have thought…that. I know I haven’t been—well, a lot’s changed—but to be honest with you, that’s always been my worst nightmare.”

And now yours, it seems. In even this, you are the same.

John’s voice goes soft as he admits to you, yes, he can’t deny he first began his experimentations when his father died—that all he could think about in his grief was what he could have done differently, what he could have had the power to change. They had so much, and in the end, it amounted to so little.

And how, in the depths of that grief, a question began to form—about life itself, and what it could be.

“But we can’t just bring someone back to life, remember,” he whispers earnestly. “Not with ectobiology—not when the core of it is _removal._ We take things and we change them. That’s how it works. You can’t do that do a person’s mind and have them be…who they were.”

His gaze drifts from you, to Liv in her new cage and the empty, glowing tanks at the periphery of the lab. Empty and waiting.

But your eyes don’t leave him, not for a moment. You think you know what he needs to say, and that is as much for himself as it is for you.

“I could never do that to him.”

His eyes fall shut, and he exhales into the space between you. It seems narrower than before; you don’t recall when you stepped so much closer, but you have.

Lost in thought, John doesn’t move away. You can almost hear what he doesn’t add, the truth that hangs heavily in his heart.

That there’s no point. That even if he could bring his father back, physically, that’s all it would ever be. Only a body, only a shell.

He can never get back what he lost.

In the stillness, you think about the conversations the two of you have had, particularly on the subject of Liv and her second life, and you think about what he first told you, all those months ago— _we could make something new_. You hadn’t forgotten, but you lost sight of it, lost in your own head, your own fears—and now you see that something new is all you could ever make, in this place.

“Dirk…” John’s voice startles you from your thoughts, and you find him looking back at you steadily. You feel that sensation again, a warmth and weightlessness that seems to bloom from your chest until you feel almost lightheaded under his gaze. “I miss him so much. I do. You know that. But that’s not what I’m doing here.”

You watch as his gaze goes soft and unfocused, even though he’s still looking right at you—almost as if he’s looking _past_ you, but—no. He’s not looking through you, as if you’re barely present, or some kind of ghost.

He looks _in_. He sees you, more clearly than you have ever allowed anyone else, if not quite all.

Despite everything you have done in this hidden place, you have yet maintained a veil between the two of you, to conceal what parts of yourself you cannot trust anyone to truly witness. Not even John.

But you want to, you think. You want to show him everything, with a desire that almost frightens you after the strain of the last few days, and so you don’t. You shake yourself, and focus on what he’s telling you, what he wants _you_ to see.

 _That’s not what I’m doing here_ , he said. Alright.

“Then show me,” you say, pulling apart the veil between you, if only by a single strand. “Show me what we’re building.”

* * *

Up until now, you thought John had given you access to all of his books, all of his notes. A few, it seems, he kept closer to the vest.

But not anymore.

Until nearly morning, he patiently waits as you pore over pages and pages of handwritten notes uninterrupted, the blueprints of a body deconstructed and reconstructed.

Not a rabbit, not a lab rat, but a person. A body built from bodies, made whole and new through ectobiology and metal. In a sense, you’re not surprised at all—you had indeed seen the pieces coming together, you just misunderstood what the final picture would be.

You’re not surprised, no, but you still feel different.

When you eventually look up, you find him watching you keenly. He smiles just a little as your eyes meet, and inches closer.

“What do you think?” he asks, sounding almost shy, as if the two of you were back in university, and he’s braced for some scathing critique. 

As if he had not left space on every page, in all the places where your designs belong.

You try not to smile back; it doesn’t feel appropriate, given all that has transpired, and all the work that lies ahead. Yet, you suspect you aren’t entirely successful, given how his own grin widens.

“This…” you trail off, searching for the words, and then laugh low and dry. “This is the craziest thing I’ve ever seen.”

It takes him a moment to recognize his own words echoed back to him, blinking at you with big owlish eyes before he laughs as well. It’s different when he does it, fond and unfettered, and your chest aches to hear it, even more so when he stops.

“This is going to be complicated,” you tell him, in the lull that follows. He nods, and you keep going. “I don’t know if it could work. There are a lot of variables, maybe too many.”

“I know, I know,” he says. His tone sounds appropriately chastised, but his smile tells you he knows he’s won. “But it’s all I can think about, all the time! I look at what we did for Liv and I really think we can do it. I _know_ we can.”

He’s already won you over. He knows he has. Yet he huffs with a strange laugh, biting his lip, looking unsure if he should continue. “And it’s just that—well—”

You wait. It’s moments, barely more than a breath, yet the air in the room feels so heavy, you feel as though you can’t even move until you hear what he has to say.

“I’ve just been thinking,” he adds. His smile softens, though it doesn’t disappear. “That maybe… I don’t need him for this place to feel like home again.”

You don’t know what to say to that. You aren’t even sure you understand.

He doesn’t seem to notice the lack; in the silence, he relaxes and recollects his notes, flipping the pages back in order with a cheery hum.

You don’t understand. But maybe you don’t need to, you decide.

You trust him.

* * *

It’s easier than you thought it would be, to get back to—well, whatever passes for normal in this place. John is, predictably, eager to get back to work, but in truth so are you.

You thought things might be awkward, perhaps strained, at least for a little while. But if anything, you almost think your work together—and the shared atmosphere in the lab—seems better than ever. More efficient, fluid.

It helps to know what you’re working towards, you think. In design if not in motivation.

The sounds of machinery and life return to the lab, more and more every day. There is so much to do in preparation, the devices you must build and test before you can even consider attaching them to a once-living thing. Particularly now that the stakes are much higher, and the resources you are meant to work with are much more difficult to replace.

You can’t afford make any mistakes here. Either of you.

John begins alchemizing the compounds necessary for the next phase of the experiment, in greater volume than he’s ever needed before. For you, this largely translates to the sounds of sustained mechanical whirring from his side of the lab, accompanied by John’s absentminded muttering, and the occasional curse.

It’s funny, you think. You used to hate even the most distant sounds from outside your workshop in Derse. Neighbors, passerby, it didn’t matter. You were often far too sleep deprived to be particularly patient with interruptions, but here… You don’t sleep much more, probably _less_ , but regardless of what work John busies himself with all around you, it never distracts you from your own.

It’s good. Despite everything—the endless horizon of work ahead of you, the grisly reality of what the two of you intend to create… It’s good. You can’t even remember the last time you felt so at ease. Not even back in Derse, in the workshop you built by hand, much less in the company of another person.

But then John isn’t like anybody else, is he? And he came back to you.

Sometimes you even let yourself smile at him across the lab, if just when he’s looking away. And when you finally collapse onto your cot each night, your rest is once again dark and dreamless.

He came back to you to you.

* * *

You always used to feel like a trespasser here; an intruder, particularly when John was away at the hospital.

It didn’t matter that you had spent most of your time in John’s house for _months_ , long before you came to live there with him, any time you stepped outside the lab you felt strange and out of place. You once froze like a cornered animal when he came home unexpectedly and encountered you in the kitchen, as if you expected him to be annoyed with you for the audacity of making a pot of tea.

But of course, that didn’t happen. It’s John. He’d only smiled at the sight of you and then asked if he could join you, as if it were your house, your kitchen. Eventually the two of you went down to the lab to work, as you always did, but that afternoon unsettled something inside you, something that took a long time to confront and understand the source of your discomfort.

It was a reminder, like a hundred other reminders, that John had always been kind to you. More than that; he had always welcomed you, respected and _believed_ in you, when no one else in this awful city had, but the truth was that his generosity had made you uncomfortable as well.

Because you didn’t deserve it. You never had. He wanted nothing more than to be your friend when you had none, and even that was too much. It scared you then, and it scares you now, that you’re always one step away from going too far, taking too many liberties… That John might finally see how you never deserved it, any of it—that he made a mistake in extending kindness to someone like you.

And yet. As of late, you find that you don’t feel like a trespasser anymore.

Now, when you take breaks to stretch, to make tea and continue your notes in the afternoon when John is away at the hospital, you’ve frequently taken to do so in the kitchen.

It’s a fine room, big enough to suit a house of this size and allow a number of servants to work in one space, if a little run down and sparsely filled now that the house has but one occupant.

Two occupants, you remind yourself.

You’ve found a corner you like best right by the window, where light streams in most afternoons, and you feel comfortable working there for hours when you need a break from the lab. It’s good, freeing, to no longer fear overstepping bounds simply by existing in a room, or forcing yourself to be unheard and unseen as much as you can.

And the next time he comes home to find you outside of the lab, you don’t startle at all. He smiles at you, same as always, and this time you don’t flinch away.

Since then, you’ve taken the opportunity to linger, some days. If he returns from the hospital to find you in the kitchen in the afternoon, he seems unable to resist asking to join you. As if you would ever deny him.

It’s but one indulgence you’ll allow yourself in this house that isn’t yours, in this life you don’t deserve—the chance to sit with John for just a little while, if for no other reason than to enjoy his company. Rare moments to share a few cups of tea together in warm, waning sunlight, before the low rumble of the lab’s machinery under your feet inevitably beckons you both back to work.

But you don’t resent the call; truly, at the end of the day, the work is where you know each other best.

* * *

From long before you came here, you know John has long exploited his position and standing at the hospital to steal supplies for his experiments. Everything from chemicals, tools and schematics, to lab rats and human organs. It’s a risk, every time, though at this point you know him to be an old hand at it. The heart was the most brazen theft, John alone for less than an hour in an otherwise bustling hospital ward. The rest you know came from university labs, tissue meant to be destroyed once the researchers had finished with it.

With this next stage in the experiment, stealing from the labs is no longer an option. Not with the quantity and complexity of anatomical resources he requires. You tease him about turning to grave robbery when he’s brooding just to watch him blanch in disgust, knowing full well that anything that’s buried would be far too deteriorated to be useful. But as weeks stretch on, and his horror seems increasingly dulled by his desperation, you’re very relieved when he tells you he’s finally secured unsupervised access to the hospital morgue.

The hardest part, he explains to you, is finding cadavers of similar makeup and build, unclaimed or preserved for other research, and dissecting in sections small enough that he can mask the theft and depart without being questioned.

It’s a slow, tricky ordeal, and it takes him weeks to secure materials in discrete, bloodless segments. The lab becomes an ever-expanding exhibition of the medical macabre as John’s thefts fill each glowing tank along the walls.

And eventually, all that will be left is for the two of you to put it all together.

It’s a daunting task to consider, but one you let fade to the back of your thoughts, most days. The collection of organic resources is largely John’s responsibility, and yours is to figure out how to keep it all powered.

And you have so many ideas. Your notes quickly fill in the blank spaces John left for you in his books and then some. As the designs spill out over your work tables and his, you show him what you’re working on for his thoughts.

You love to watch him as he looks them over, teeth worrying into his lip as he thinks. You love it even more when he frowns, as he does when he doesn’t understand something you’ve written, because you love any opportunity to explain things to him.

You think he knows it, too; he rolls his eyes at the look on your face, surrendering your work back to you with a dramatic sigh.

“You know what, I’ll take your word for it,” he says. “You’re the expert.”

“I am, thank you,” you laugh, soft under the sound of his exasperated muttering and grumbling about how impossible you are, but sincere all the same.

John returns to his own work eventually, but after a while you see how he steals glances in your direction, lips twitching with fondness he doesn’t even think to fight.

You almost wish you hadn’t seen it. It always seems dangerous to you, to be made to feel so at home.

* * *

Over the next few weeks, you build several prototypes that could potentially serve as the power source. Much like the device you made for Liv, you intend for this one to be grafted to the heart, to recharge its ectobiologically engineered cells with every beat. You return to pig hearts to test various models, to refine strength of voltage you’ll need for a human.

And then, one by one, the prototypes fail.

With voltage too strong, the heart seizes. But with voltage too weak, you know the whole system will slowly begin to fail. You saw it happen to Liv, and you won’t see it happen again.

Sleepless, agonized, you repeat this experiment half a dozen times, but it never works. You go through three hearts from the butcher shop, and several more fresh from the slaughterhouse, over and over, until even ectology can’t recover the damage your devices caused.

The problem could be with the material. You know that. But you don’t dare test your devices with the human heart, the only one you have, that John risked everything just to bring home. The thought of it makes you nearly sick with stress.

You need to focus on something else. You can come back to it when you’re ready. John tells you this, and he’s right, but still you can’t let it go. You try again, with fresher hearts and refined devices, but the results are the same.

You don’t know where the issue lies; if the problem is with your design, your materials, or with you. You try not to think that maybe you were simply lucky before. That maybe your success in the past was a coincidence in the first place—maybe John cracked it alone, and you were merely present.

 _You’re the expert_ , he said. The words echo in your head, late into the night, turning mocking and cruel, twisting from John’s voice into your own.

You don’t know why you’re torturing yourself, why you’re putting yourself through this, but you just want to solve it.

He’s trusting you to solve this.

* * *

You haven’t been outside in days. John points this out to you, teasing at first, and then quite sincere. To your surprise he even suggests that you walk with him to the hospital sometime, just for fresh air.

You like the idea, at first. You’re fascinated by the very notion of what it might be like to walk together in the sunlight, after spending months in this dark basement. Prospit can be beautiful, and for a moment you wonder what it might be like to see it at his side. As John’s equal. His…friend.

But eventually, you remember who you are. You remember who John is, and where he works, and know that anywhere you go in this neighborhood, you’re likely to be recognized by other former classmates. All now professionals of industry in Prospit, and you—can’t get a fucking pig heart to beat.

“I just need to sleep,” you promise him, and try not to think about the disappointment and worry that pulls at his brow.

It’s fine, you think. It doesn’t matter if John doesn’t believe you; if you tell yourself anything enough, eventually it’ll be true.

* * *

The right arm had come to the lab in three separate pieces, over three separate days. Each segment was ectologically decontaminated and treated, a process that sometimes takes John a week, maybe two.

And in that time, you’re not sure if you’ve slept more than a few hours. You’ve barely eaten in days. You’re nearly delirious with exhaustion the day he begins reassembling it, much too shaky to work, or for doing anything but playing audience to John’s surgical theater.

You’ve made no progress on the devices, and he knows how heavily it weighs on you, how much you punish yourself if left to stew in the lab by yourself. He’s worried about you; he’s terrible at hiding it, but even worse at talking about it, so he tries to distract you instead, preparing for the procedure by playing up the theatrics of every gesture, as if he’s some hapless doctor on a stage, all in the hopes of making you smile.

And if your lips twitch at the corner, you try not to let it get to his head.

It’s rare enough these days, watching John with his half of the work. You often have too much of your own to do. But not today. The only thing left for you to do is watch over your knees as he grows silent and contemplative, barely moving for hours as he painstakingly reconnects severed nerves and tissue, stitching two segments together at the wrist before moving to the third at the elbow.

Dazed and weary, your thoughts feel slippery, difficult to rein in. It’s hard to remember why you should look away and not watch him so intently. The lab is cold, but you feel so warm, hugging your knees to your chest, and watching him work without a care of how it could be perceived.

But as tired as you are, you don’t miss when he suddenly stops, when the look of concentration on his face furrows into something else.

“Damnit,” he mutters. “I messed up.”

He begins to explain, but you’re so tired, it takes so long for his words to make sense through the fog of your thoughts. He took a chance segmenting the arm at the elbow, hoping it would make for quick reassembly, but in doing so damaged part of the joint more than he realized, beyond what he can repair.

“It’s fine,” he’s quick to reassure you, “—don’t _worry_ , I promise, I can get a replacement soon, probably just a few days—”

You’re already standing, unfolding from your chair before you even remember why you were sitting in the first place. Concern flashes in John’s expression, but your thoughts are racing far too quickly to stop.

“I can make one,” you blurt. You don’t know how you didn’t think of it sooner. You can _make one_. An artificial joint to replace what can’t be repaired—that’s easy, you’ve built machines with joints so complex they could move as seamlessly as a snake, there’s no reason you can’t replace an elbow, a knee— “Fuck!”

“Dirk,” comes John’s voice, almost timorous as you pace around him.

If you can make an artificial joint, you might even be able to use it to help modulate the electrical current throughout the entire body, how didn’t you _see it_ —you almost feel lightheaded—

“ _Dirk_.”

You take a step, and promptly realize why John looked so nervous, as your exhaustion hits you all at once. For a second you think you might even fall, but John is there at your side, holding your arm with his steady grip, keeping you upright. Your throat feels tight, and you take an unsteady breath.

“Did you say something about— _snakes_? You’re not making any sense,” he says. You blink, slowly. You didn’t even realize you were speaking out loud. “You need to sleep.”

Your head is spinning. _Take me to bed_ , you think, delirious, and he does, but not in the way you meant.

* * *

You sleep, for a little while. You may not wake up feeling particularly rested, but more importantly, you wake up knowing what you need to do.

John can’t rework bone, not with ectobiology. While he can repair bone like any other surgeon, with patches and wires and screws, he cannot replace what’s been lost. But you can.

You may not be a surgeon, but with the right specifications… John would no longer be constrained by the one thing he could not afford to break.

And you are no longer constrained either. It took you a while to see it, but now you know that the answer is not in building a single device.

You need to develop a network, one that follows the seams of John’s vision, to graft components throughout the body that will share the electrical burden. A mechanical system that connects all of the parts you build together, to fit inside the body that John puts together.

It could be beautiful, you think. It will be beautiful.

In fact, John is nearly ecstatic when you show him what you have planned, smiling at you so brilliantly that you think he might try to hug you. You tell yourself you’re relieved that he doesn’t, but when his hand comes up to squeeze your shoulder, your heart stutters nonetheless.

“You really are the expert, huh?” he teases. “I never doubted you.”

The words pierce you like an arrow. It’s fond; he would only ever mean it to you fondly. But you struggle to stay present and not sink into dark thoughts, feeling untethered despite the weight his hand on your shoulder.

“The work’s not over yet,” you say, as steadily as you are able. A laugh hides the tremble you feel deep inside, rattling around in your chest, one that only worsens when his hand falls away.

* * *

There’s so much to do, for the system you devised to function as intended. John’s inspired enough to work through the night, days and days in a row, and despite your ever-growing exhaustion, you’re all too eager to join him.

The work gets messier. Chemical smells and the wet organic sounds of surgery fill the night hours. You even assist sometimes, where you’re able. Other times, all you can do is watch as his hands move across his work. You often forget to sleep, forget to eat, but at least now it’s because you’re too busy.

Sometimes even when you want to sleep, you can’t.

Over and over, night after night, you work yourself to the bone, and it doesn’t matter. Your body aches, and you scarcely remember what it feels like to be rested, if you’ve ever been. But your head finds the pillow and your mind doesn’t quiet, full to the brim with thoughts and ideas and inspiration.

There’s _so much_ to do.

Every day, another tank in the lab becomes vacant, and the body forming on the surgical slab becomes a little more complete.

* * *

The worst hours are right before dawn. The agonizing time between John leaving the lab to rest and when _you_ finally try to sleep, if you’re able. In these hours your mind wanders terribly, and you can’t escape the ceaseless desperation of your thoughts, too tired to work but unable to sleep.

It’s only in this time that you think, _but what comes next?_

More and more, success feels possible, a potential that thrills and inspires and scares you in equal measure.

What happens, the day John flips that final switch?

Could a life really come from this place? Can you truly create something new, from all these borrowed things? Can you create a _soul_?

But these are abstract thoughts. Pointlessly high minded philosophizing. You try not to think about it so much, for the reality of your work is so much more complicated, and so much uglier. It’s your burnt, bruised fingertips and aching body; it’s building a central nervous system out of medical waste, and building a body to wrap it in, piece by piece.

It’s these sleepless hours where you lay questioning every moment that brought you to this place.

 _And why_ , you think, as if you don’t know the answer. This isn’t your dream. Why do it?

For him.

This isn’t your dream, no, but you want… You want what you’ve always wanted. To be his equal in all things, to show John what you are capable of, not because he doesn’t believe in you but explicitly because he _does_.

He believed you could make this work for him, that your skills could be the missing link for him, and you are determined to _prove it_. If not to him, to yourself.

He wants to create a life with you. A soul. Who else would want this? Who else could do for John what you can?

Maybe this wasn’t your dream. But now it is.

* * *

There are other thoughts stirring, lately.

Memories, mostly. Idle daydreams. A restlessness that starts in your chest and burns out slowly, distracting and taunting you, until all your other thoughts fall away, leaving you with only one singular focus, one you dare not acknowledge at any decent hour.

You’re not sleeping much, sometimes not at all. Perhaps it’s been too long, spending months and months with your mind and body cooped up in this cold, strange place, with no one but John for company.

And your creations, of course. But they don’t speak to you. Certainly not Liv, though who can say what will come of the other? That’s a question you are far too exhausted to even entertain without the threat of nervous, unsteady laughter rattling in your chest. It doesn’t matter anyway.

No matter what comes of the body forming in the lab, it could never be like John, because _no one_ is like John.

You’ve known that since you met him, you think. Even when you hated him. That he was different, somehow—not different in the way you are, that you have always known yourself to be, but something else. Someone who could embody all of the qualities you hate most, yet exist in perfect contradiction to all of your expectations.

And now—you can’t get him out of your head. It’s worse than usual, worse than ever before. Ever since you came back to Prospit, John has occupied a place in your thoughts you could not excise, and haven’t even wanted to try. You almost felt you owed it to him, when you barely thought of him for years, despite all he had done for you.

But never has the thought of him left you so sharply yearning, staring into the rafters above your head as if you might reach him by desire alone.

You’ve never thought of him like that before, you insist to yourself, as if you must be convinced. More to the point, you don’t _want_ to think of him that way. You just want him to be happy, after everything he’s given you, that’s all it is.

You want to help him feel alive again.

You’re just lonely, you tell yourself. You’ve _always_ been lonely—but the problem is you have never felt alone here, not when you and John are of the same mind, and yet thoughts still won’t leave you.

There is just such intimacy in creation. You can’t help but feel it now every night you work in the lab together, even when the work is tiring and messy and frankly foul, and it always is. You have done much for him, and you know you will do much more. For your formal rival, now partner in all manner of crimes, except one.

You try not to think about it. You really do. You know he’s not like you, that he can’t see you in that way, and it has long been enough for you that he sees you at all. That he sees you in so many ways no one else does.

But sometimes, as of late, alone on your narrow cot in the lab, you can’t help but let yourself wonder. Would it be too much, you think, to let the veil finally fall between you, and show him one more side? To ask for nothing but the chance to show him how good you could make him feel, if he would only let you?

Does he know why you were expelled? It was only a rumor, but a rumor was enough. Does he know how you watch his hands move as he cuts and builds, as he manipulates flesh, creating the exact place where his work will join with yours? Could he know what it does to you, when your thoughts are unguarded?

He must not. He must not know any of it. He would never have let you into this place, built this lab with you, if he knew what lurked in your heart.

But sometimes… Sometimes you think, it’s true you have been called an unnatural thing, but this is an unnatural place, unnatural work.

And John is here, with you.

* * *

In your waking hours you don’t feel awake. When you lay down to sleep you never rest. You work through a haze, days bleeding into one another endlessly, and you can’t remember the last time you saw sunlight.

But you don’t stop. You can’t stop.

You’re so _close_.

The tanks around the lab are virtually empty. There’s nothing left; all the parts he’s collected have been assembled, stitched and wired and welded together. A body built from bodies, made whole and new through ectobiology and engineering, just as he designed.

And complete for all but one thing, the one piece John has yet to procure: a head. A consciousness, if such a thing is possible. You’ll find out soon, you think. 

Until then, the body rests in the lab, pale and still under a crisp white sheet like a shroud, waiting.

Not for burial, but for birth of a kind—and waiting for you.

“Don’t we need to hurry?” you had asked him. How long could the body remain in this state, outside of the ectological solution, before all of your work has been for nothing?

How long could it wait for you to get this right?

“It’s okay,” John says, over and over. It’s okay. There’s time, more than enough time, because it has to be perfect. It has to be, he says. He smiles and he tells you not to worry and you believe him.

This is his world. Much like your creation, you can do is wait.

It’s not easy. Over days that turn into weeks, anxiety and dread build and build behind your eyes, weighing you down. You don’t so much as approach the surgical table, when John is away from the lab.

Afraid to even touch it, in this state. Afraid you might somehow ruin it.

But when John is home, when he’s hard at work ensuring that your strange creation will still be ready once a head can be retrieved, you always watch. You have seen the parts accumulating for months, you helped put it all together, but it’s always extraordinary to glimpse the body as it is.

In form it is almost small, like a young man, slight in build and in most ways almost unremarkable. If you didn’t know where he came from, anyway. It seems almost comfortably familiar to you, like any living person you could pass on the street. Perhaps he could even walk amongst people with relative ease, here in Prospit or anywhere, if his scars heal, the seams between one life and another, all that make him what he is.

It’s a captivating thought for you. In the bare hours you doze if not sleep, you imagine it often. It could be beautiful, for something like him to exist, human yet not, this new life built from old lives and borrowed parts.

And now there is but one left. You know that a head must not be so easy to come by, of all the things John has stolen from the morgue, but it has to be right. More than right.

 _It has to be perfect_ , he said.

And what does perfection look like, you wonder, to someone like John?

* * *

You were always restless at night, even as a child. So many nights found you sleepless, wrapped in blankets, reading till late in front of your wood stove back in Derse. Back when it was a home, and not just a house.

Your brother would often find you there in the coldest hours of the morning, curled up on the kitchen floor, asleep at last, and carry you to bed.

Oh, you miss him. You think of him so often now, with an ache in your chest that never really fades. You miss your parents. You miss remembering what they look like. What their arms might have felt like, carrying you as a child, and you miss remembering how they loved you.

You wonder if they would love you now.

The lab feels so cold at night, colder than it ever has before. For so long this has been the only room you felt truly comfortable in, that you truly belong in, but no longer. Every night it feels more like a morgue, a tomb, a slaughterhouse.

Maybe you shouldn’t be sleeping down here anymore. The steady hum and glow from the tanks has never bothered you, not when you can barely sleep anyway, and in fact on many nights you found it strangely soothing.

But as the body of your creation has grown in its construction just paces from where you lay, the more it feels as if…

As if you’ve become a trespasser, all over again. Only it’s not John’s hospitality you are intruding upon, but what the two of you have built here.

Perhaps this is his domain now, you think, absurdly. Perhaps you are no longer welcome.

But where else can you go? John has been trying to talk you into moving into a bedroom upstairs again, lately. You can still barely imagine it. To even be on the same floor as John feels dangerous, almost terrifying. You doubt you’d be able to rest there either, floors away or rooms away, so close to him, yet no more.

Even now, the nights you spend working in the lab together feel altogether perilous. Every evening John examines the body, administers rounds of fresh ectological solution to keep it in suspension, and through every _single_ step all you can do is watch him. You watch his hands at work, his blue eyes in such perfect concentration, and you don’t think you breathe at all. You’re only lucky he doesn’t see it, that he doesn’t feel how you burn when he’s too near.

You don’t want this. You don’t want to feel this way. You don’t want to ask from him what he can never give you, and be forced to return to the life you had without him in it.

You have spent your life powerless and alone. But, in this place, you have power, control over life and death, same as John.

And at his side here, perhaps neither of you have to be alone again.

That should be enough for you. It _should_ be enough that you’re here, that you can share in this knowledge and power. That you have found a partner that drives you, that values you the way you know John values you.

It was enough, not long ago. But not anymore.

Long nights leave you so unsteady now. You’ve never burned this long on so little. It’s getting harder to lie to yourself when you’re so very tired, and aching so keenly, day after day.

You have always managed to tell yourself what you need to hear to keep going, but you cannot pretend anymore, you cannot convince yourself you are content. You cannot convince yourself that the ache in you is some new, momentary whim, brought on by close quarters and long nights, insulated together from the rest of the world in a place of your making.

Nothing more. Nothing. You’ve been telling yourself that for a long time now. And it’s not true. You want what you have always wanted.

You have always desired him. Ever since the day you met him, John angered and challenged and inspired you and you _wanted him_.

You never let yourself even consider it. An impossible dream, even before you had been forced from school. And once you had, you buried that dream over and over, until you could barely think of him at all without causing yourself pain. So you didn’t. You didn’t think about him, not once in years, until he pulled you into his world.

And now he’s everything. He’s _your_ world, your future. Your past as well, painful as it may be to remember.

Sleepless, fitful, you let yourself wonder. What might it have been like, if you had taken a chance in school? If you hadn’t been so afraid, if you hadn’t been so convinced that the sharp edge of your desire was hatred and nothing else—perhaps it could have been different. The bright-eyed Prospitian boy that trembled in your cramped dormitory bed, that kissed you open-mouthed and needy for more, could that have been John?

The thought makes you dizzy, even with your head pressed against the pillow. How different would your lives be now, perhaps better?

Or would you have just taken John down with you in shame, and ruined both your lives? But, worse—would it have been worth being kicked out of school for, if it had been John, and not someone who simply reminded you of him?

Your body tenses, and you exhale, because in horror and elation you think, _yes_. It would have been worth it.

And that’s what sickens you, after all this time, and shames you to inaction and silence. You could have ruined his life as much as you ruined your own and not regretted a thing if it meant you could have had him.

It would have been worth it. It would have been. To kiss him, to be _his,_ even for a day. Even if John resented you for it—or even if he came to hate you as much as you once thought you hated him.

You’ve kept this veil between you out of necessity, to obscure the parts of yourself you need to hide, because if it falls apart then John will see you for what you really are, selfish and destructive, an endless well of need that would take from him until there was nothing left.

You don’t want him to stop looking at you the way he’s always looked at you. You don’t want to destroy everything you’ve built here before it’s even truly begun.

It’s not what you want to be, but it is what you are. You can only accept it.

Dizzy, sick with it, you stumble out of your cot in the lab. The air is freezing, the hum from the empty tanks so oppressively loud—but more than any of it, you need to get away from that cobbled together form under its clean white sheet. You can’t sleep here anymore.

The stairs to the kitchen are pitch black, creaking and unstable under your steps, and the sense of sickness that spurred you from bed only intensifies the longer you’re on your feet.

Your head is swimming as you reach the kitchen. It’s dark as well, the whole house is unsettlingly quiet, a shocking absence of the low hum that has permeated the air of every night you’ve spent in this house.

And it’s _warm_. It’s so warm even in the dead of night you instantly forget what it feels like to be cold. You manage but a few shaky steps before you sink to the floor and shudder, so dizzy and exhausted you can barely keep your eyes open.

You sleep, at last, with your cheek pressed to the warm stone floor, and your mind clear.

* * *

You wake there, some hours later. You’re not sure exactly; it doesn’t feel like long, even if it’s more sleep than you’ve gotten in weeks.

It’s still early. Mid morning, maybe—early enough to see sunlight warming the trees in the courtyard just outside the kitchen, pouring through the cracks of the servant’s entrance. Early enough to even hear John awake and moving around somewhere above you.

That alone is surprising, but then you realize he’s moving towards you, or towards the stairs to the foyer, and you scramble to get off the floor, with your face red and burning. The floors creak terribly in this house; you can easily track his steps down the formerly grand staircase and downstairs, but he bypasses the hall to the kitchen entirely on his way out the door, thankfully not looking in your direction at all.

As disheveled and embarrassed as you feel, you imagine you must look much worse. You’re just relieved he didn’t see you, as the memories for how you wound up on the floor in the first place seem shaky to you now. You know you would have heard him come in if he’d been anywhere near the kitchen, so you should be spared having to explain it.

You try to put it out of your mind. At least you finally got some sleep.

* * *

You pass the rest of the day back down in the lab with your head buried in your notebooks, much as you always do, but as the afternoon and evening roll in, you eventually realize you haven’t heard John return.

He’s not a surgeon, anymore. His work in pathology rarely keeps him late. You know he still has a life outside these walls, or an echo of one, enough to keep up necessary appearances, though he’s distanced himself from even that as of late.

You try not to worry, but as the hours stretch on, you wonder.

Though you didn’t intend to, you wind up working throughout the night, into the earliest morning hours, and John is still gone.

The windows of the basement are boarded up, and though you can’t see through them, you heard the wind and the rain rush against the glass outside for most of the night. It’s possible you didn’t hear him come in at all, especially when engrossed in your reading. He might have gotten in late, you think; perhaps gone to bed tired or even ill. There would be no reason to come all the way down just for pleasantries.

You're not worried. You're not. But eventually you go upstairs, through the kitchen and into the foyer. The house is quiet at this hour, same as yesterday, yet this feels different. A pale blue sky stretches outside the windows, and you stand there for a time at the foot of the staircase, listening, lost in thought.

You are not an invader here. Not a guest. Something more, though you dare not assign it a name.

You want to find him. But you’ve never been upstairs. You don’t know which room is his, where to even look.

You take the chance to call for him, just once, from the foot of the stairs.

Only silence follows. He could be sleeping, but the truth is that you suspect he’s not home at all.

* * *

You don’t know what to think.

You don’t know if you should be worried, but you are.

Anything could have happened. He could have been injured on the way home from work, and you would never know, because who would even think to come tell you? You don’t exist in this city, not to anyone but John.

But there are other explanations. Worse, terrifying explanations. That perhaps John’s luck had finally run out, that he was caught in the morgue with a tape measure and a bone saw and this was it.

It’s laughably absurd, or it would be, if your life weren’t in the balance for it. The Queensguard could be on their way now, to ransack the lab and destroy everything you’ve built—and if they find you here, they will destroy you as well.

And yet, what frightens you the most is altogether different, far more personal. That perhaps he stayed out on purpose. Despite living here for months, your existence is a secret. You don’t know almost anything about John’s life outside these walls.

He could have been with someone. You wouldn’t know it. Or what if you were wrong? You haven’t been well. Your control has slipped from you more than once, leaving you gazing at him a little too long, a little too hungrily—is it possible you’ve left your desire for him so humiliatingly exposed even John could not misinterpret it?

You let exhaustion excuse your behavior over and over, letting yourself stand closer than necessary at any opportunity, to let your shoulders and hands brush his in overtures that seem deafening and shameful to you now, to have made yourself so unmistakably available someone who has never seen you that way and will never see you that way.

He wanted to be your friend, all those years ago, when it would never have been enough for you. You’ve tried to let it be enough for you now, and still, you failed.

* * *

As the hours stretch on into the day, the turmoil of your thoughts settles into a dark but placid stillness.

You never approach the surgical slab when John isn’t in the lab, but today you do. You stand there for a long time, gazing down at this incomplete creation you had built with him, neither living nor dead, in perfect suspension, and you feel at peace.

You’re not going anywhere.

Preoccupied as you are with these thoughts, the tranquility it brings your restless mind, you almost don’t hear him return. It isn’t until the creak of John’s steps reach the stairs leading to the lab that you realize that he’s home, and at the sight of him at the door of the lab you barely know how to react.

You want to laugh. You want to cry. You feel foolish for panicking but so achingly relieved you can do nothing but close your eyes and breathe.

Other things occur to you more slowly. You may have lost some sense of the time, but you know it’s not late. Mid afternoon at best, an hour when John should most certainly still be at work.

You don’t think you’ve ever seen him in such a state. Hair disheveled, face unshaven, still wearing the clothes he was yesterday, rumpled and splattered with mud. Such a contrast to how you’d seen him last, that brief glance you caught of him on his way out the door, freshly groomed and dressed for work, before the door shut behind him and he simply vanished for a day and a night.

But he’s returned to you, as he always has, his face breaking into a wide and beaming smile at the sight of you. You think your heart stops, in that moment.

John has a strange case with him, one that hums.

As he opens it, the world seems to stop as well.

He’s speaking to you, but the words fade into the background. Your pulse is racing. Your throat closes up. You don’t understand.

 _Took the case from the hospital,_ he’s saying, _need to return it quickly,_ _couldn’t risk transporting this without ectological preservation_.

The missing piece. The one you’ve been waiting for, that had to be perfect. John sets the head in its softly glowing tank at the end of the surgical slab, drawing back the sheet, allowing you to see easily take in the body and its perfectly matching head.

In assembling the creature, it has at times reminded you of something. Seemed somehow familiar to you in ways you could not entirely explain or accurately pin down. You thought perhaps because it seemed so human, so _natural,_ despite its provenance, looking neither alien nor monstrous.

This familiarity that you have watched develop, that which you could not put a name to, you can no longer ignore.

It looks like you.

The body shares your build, even your complexion in parts, and now the head… You don’t really know how to react to the sight of it. You’re not even sure if you’re awake. Your head is spinning, eyes burning as you stare, and even though your mouth falls open you still can’t speak.

But the face. His _face_. It’s like looking into a mirror, smudged and imperfect, but a mirror none the less. His hair is ruddier than yours, features just a little more sharp, but the resemblance is such that you’re quite certain this man could almost be your twin.

Is this a dream? A cruel joke? You should be horrified. But you’re not sure horror is the feeling that tightens in your chest.

Everything has stopped.

 _What is this_ , you think, over and over. _What is this?_

You feel John’s eyes on you and turn your head to find him gazing at you steadily, smiling still, smiling so bright and warm and beautiful, waiting for your approval like he always does.

You don’t know how you find words, in that yawning silence.

“Are you building my replacement?” you ask, words rippling and shaky, with something not quite a laugh. Gallows humor, perhaps; you were always destined for them anyway.

John’s smile falls away at once into something you can only think to describe as a pout.

“Never! Dirk, _no,_ ” he insists at once, as if somehow wounded. “What could give you that idea?”

Weakly, you gesture to the slab before you, and all it holds. Your creation. _His_ creation. Your ectobiologically constructed twin. You don’t even know what to say to help him understand, if the tableau in front of you is not enough.

But he’s not looking at the table. He’s looking at you. He’s in motion, reaching up to you, his hands clasped gently around your face, until you can do nothing but look into his eyes.

You’re very still. You breathe in soft rasps, waiting, and John has the decency to look sheepish, even as he smiles at you.

“It had to be perfect,” he says to you, so earnestly your heart aches. “I wanted him to reflect the best of us, you know? He’s, well—”

He looks almost shy now, a faint blush warming his face, biting his lip. “He’s kind of like our child, really.”

You thought of this place as a tomb, just nights ago. A dark and unnatural place. But to John, it seems, it has been a nursery. You want to laugh at the madness of it all but you can barely think, barely move.

You didn’t see it. You were so blind, so consumed, you missed something terribly important. You have been so afraid he would reject you. Scorn you. That someone like him could never accept the whole of who you are.

But here, now, his hands haven’t left you. He’s only moved closer. He touches your face, gazing at you with bright, eager eyes, and you kiss him. You need to kiss him. You need to show him who you are, all the things you are, as he has shown you.

He doesn’t stop you. He doesn’t pull away, he doesn’t leave. He seems startled only for a moment, and then his hands are in your hair, tightening in your clothes.

John kisses you back. He kisses you endlessly.

You hold him close, and you don’t let go. You show him how you need him, you show him how to fuck you, and he tells you that he feels alive.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry there's still one more wait for the finale but it shouldn't take as long as this one... plus it's my birthday so it's illegal for you to be mean to me about it :(


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> You don’t have time to waste. This week you’ve barely slept, and you need to sleep. It’s been days. But the night finds you in the lab alone, staring at his face for so long that your eyes burn. 
> 
> What is he? What will he become, with your mind as the roadmap?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And here we are, at the end, and a beginning. For Valentine's Day please enjoy some crimes against man, nature, and decency 😌✨

Much later, you wonder idly how you missed it, but in truth, you know the answer.

For hours after the sun sets, you lay awake, half asleep and pleasantly aching, more relaxed in John’s bed than you have felt in months. Your mind drifts. You want to rest, but even now, with John snoring softly beside you, you can’t quite get your thoughts to settle. It’s not unpleasant, not this time; you doze, here and there, and you look back on the time you’ve spent together, curiously turning over your memories like stones to reexamine them, with all that you now know.

You missed it. You missed so much. That John wanted a lab partner, someone trustworthy, someone who could help with this mad experiment, hidden away in an illegal lab that could never see the light of day—that made sense to you. Not this.

It’s true that he never hid how he desired your friendship, and you would never question for a moment how sincere that desire was. He had been affectionate with you at school, but he was affectionate with everyone. Even when you were young, you knew better than to read into it, to hope.

Or, you thought you did, anyway. Perhaps, for a long time, raised in this once-fine home, this high society neighborhood—hell, this entire golden city _,_ with all of its rigid rules and expectations, John may not have understood a desire like _yours_ was an option to him.

All your Prospitian classmates were like that, you remember. Intelligent and educated but ignorant all the same; naive to the cruelties of the world, to the possibilities outside of their experience. John in particular seemed mortifyingly oblivious to how his affectionate nature and his overtures of friendship to someone like you could be misinterpreted.

You don’t know when it changed for him, only that it clearly has. And you were blind to it, as you always are, because you couldn’t see how you fit into the future that John was working towards. You couldn’t see how John would want to build a family you were part of; that anyone could want such a thing with you, much less him.

And yet, here you are.

You smile. You don’t even try to fight it.

You think you’re happy. After the rush of confusion and relief fades, there remains a feeling of warmth in your chest, burning so soft and so sweetly. It feels beautiful and new and dangerous, a sense of contentment you don’t think you’ve felt before. It frightens you, but you don’t want it to stop.

You lay there for hours, long after John had fallen asleep. Thinking, wondering.

Eventually, John rolls over, mumbling in his rest. He pulls closer to you, not further apart, and with a flutter in your damaged heart, you let yourself be lulled to sleep.

* * *

John’s room is on the second floor, as it turns out.

You did make it there eventually, though not for a while. The narrow cot in the lab buckled under your combined weight in moments, dropping you both to the floor, and in that moment you barely noticed, barely blinked. Not with John pressed against you, the sound of his shocked and gleeful laugh when the cot fell apart, his touch and his nearness filling you with a yearning like you’ve never known.

He was inexperienced, fumbling at times with his nerves, but sweet. Sweet and eager, which was more than enough for you. He kissed you fast and desperate until he found his bearings, then slow and deep, till you felt you might sob if he stopped.

And by morning, sunlight finds you still wrapped in his sheets.

You can’t remember the last time you slept through the night, much less in a real bed. You also can’t remember the last time you wanted to linger like this with anyone, content to take any excuse to stay in bed. To not wake him, to have to face the day anywhere but here.

So far, at least, you’ve got your wish.

Beside you, John still sleeps heavily, undisturbed by your wakefulness, or really anything at all. For months you used to wonder when he slept, if he did at all, and now you wonder how he ever wakes up.

Sometimes on his days off, you’d barely hear anything upstairs, barely a single sign of life, but you largely assumed he was out running errands. Perhaps going about whatever life you thought he had outside the lab. Now you somewhat suspect he was passing the time catching up on sleep, virtually dead to the world. You’re almost jealous.

Or you would be, anyway, if you weren’t taking advantage of the opportunity to press as close to him as you can, still hungry for his warmth and proximity, unwilling to give it up even after spending the entire night entangled with him.

And the longer he sleeps, the longer you can enjoy this. You lay there for a while like that, your cheek pressed to his shoulder, your body practically boneless against his side. Too comfortable to be restless and too curious to drift back to sleep, with your eyes cataloguing the room around you to pass the time.

You’ve never seen his room before, almost any part of his life outside the lab before, despite the months you’ve spent living in his house.

Then again, the lab in the basement seems so far removed from the finer rooms of this house that it may as well be located on another world.

It’s not much of an exaggeration, either. It’s so different here; brighter, warmer. There are tall ceilings and windows, a sense of light and space and openness that seems truly alien to you after sleeping in the lab for so long.

It’s a little cleaner than how you keep your own rooms, but not by much. For a while now, you’ve thought it odd that a house this big only had a half dozen teacups in the kitchen downstairs, but, well, you found the rest of them.

It isn’t until John finally wakes up, lifting his head to smile at you brightly and sleepily that you catch yourself feeling embarrassed to be staring, self conscious, as if you’d been snooping through his belongings rather than counting chipped bits of paint on the wall.

That could be why you feel caught out, or perhaps it was the direction your thoughts had started to take in the morning stillness, about John, and about what this could mean, and how very dangerous that felt.

Looking at him now, you don’t know what to say. Under the familiar warmth of that smile, his fond gaze, you want to say so many things. You want to kiss him.

“Should we get back to the lab?” you say instead, your voice as steady as you can make it. Your creation awaits, after all—and that, somehow, feels much safer territory than the words welling up unspoken in your throat.

But in response, John simply laughs, making no move to get up.

“We _could,_ ” he says, in a playful hum clearly intended to be teasing, and your face grows hot against your will. “But I don’t have to go back to work for a couple days, and you know the decontamination process needs at least another eighteen hours,” he reminds you, smiling still.

Decontamination. Right. Shit. You knew that, you really did.

“Right,” you echo your thoughts, and find yourself completely unprepared for John brazenly reaching up to brush your hair back and out of your eyes.

You barely breathe until his hand falls away, but when his touch falls to your chin and your open mouth, you don’t breathe at all.

“It’s been ages since you took a day off, Dirk,” he says, so effortlessly admonishing, even as you go so very still. “Better make the most of it, huh?”

“Oh,” you murmur, and then _yes,_ and later, _please_.

* * *

After that, you barely leave John’s room for more than a day. You barely leave the bed either, though it’s not entirely physical pursuits that keep you there.

In fact, the two of you spend most of the time talking, in a manner almost no different from taking tea together on any other afternoon. You spend hours discussing the finer points of your experiment, exchanging ideas and teasing critique.

It’s the kind of intellectual intimacy you’ve shared with John for a long time, comfortably familiar to you, and yet altogether new. Because now, his hand runs through your hair as you speak, down your neck, smiling at you and rolling his eyes to tease you in turn.

You love it, you do. And you’ve ached for his attention in exactly this way, but it’s been a long time since anyone looked at you like that, or even close, because no one has ever looked at you the way John looks at you.

You feel as though you’ve been in the dark for a long time. You crave the sunlight, but you’re unused to it, and it burns.

You don’t want to shy away from his attention, but eventually you do, with your gaze darting around to John’s room if just to have something to look at.

He sits up a little then, mistaking your nerves for something else, and he looks sheepish as his gaze follows yours to the clutter around his room. You don’t particularly care about it, but it’s funny that he thinks you do.

“Oh, jeez,” he mumbles sheepishly. “Sorry, guess I haven’t cleaned up in a while.”

Huffing a quiet laugh, your hand relaxes on his stomach, flat against his skin.

“We’ve been a bit preoccupied,” you say dryly, to which he blushes, and you snort. “In the _lab_ , John.”

“I know!” he sputters, laughing, but his cheeks only get redder. Though you long to keep teasing him, feeling quite owed to the opportunity, he suddenly grows thoughtful and quiet, glancing around his room too, as if, like you, he were seeing it for the first time.

You almost wonder where his thoughts have gone, but you suspect you know.

“This isn’t really—” he starts, then stops. Your hand on his chest moves as he breathes, but the rest of you falls very still as you wait. “It’s not really _my_ room, I guess? I only started sleeping in here a couple years ago.”

 _Ah_ , you think. Closest bedroom to the lab, perhaps? It’s only a wonder he wasn’t already moved into the basement himself by the time you joined him.

Softly, he continues, “I haven’t gone upstairs much since my father died. Didn’t really feel like moving into his room even if it was bigger than my old room, so…”

He shrugs. Your throat feels tight, thinking back to your family house in Derse. How you rearranged and reconstructed nearly every inch of it as soon as you were able, even tearing some walls down by hand when you were young and impatient.

Empty rooms couldn’t feel so empty if they didn’t exist at all, you figured.

There was no family left, after all. No need for walls or privacy or keepsakes. And after your expulsion from university the house became your workshop, where you slept and ate and worked alone. Day in, day out.

The only room spared was your brother’s, upstairs—you didn’t need it, you told yourself. You didn’t need the space, so you just didn’t need to go up there at all.

“I understand,” is all you say. Your voice is low, but you know he hears you, and you feel how he relaxes under your careful touch.

After a moment, he turns to look at you, and he seems quite different. Smiling, eyes shining, shedding the weight of his painful memories like an old coat. You wish it were as easy as he likes to make it look.

“Oh Dirk, we should move Liv upstairs!” he exclaims suddenly. “Do you think she’d like it if I set her cage up in the kitchen? I like seeing her when we’re working but she might be happier where it’s nice and warm, don’t you think? Especially if—” here he breaks off, biting his lip for a moment, as if uncertain. “With no one down there, she’ll be by herself.”

Right. The project is nearly completed. The two of you are perhaps days away from some wholly unknowable new life, if your experiment is successful. And besides—you had decided even before the whirlwind of the last few days that you couldn’t sleep in the lab anymore, not with the creature’s body there in that state, but you hadn’t even had the chance to tell John—ah.

It occurs to you moments too late what John is hedging towards. That he’s not talking about the end of the project, not exactly, and the look on his face isn’t a portrait of unease, it’s hope.

Hope in the way that only you can inspire it; thin, uncertain, overshadowed by the expectation of disappointment.

You think you know what he wants here. But the problem is that you want it too, which scares you.

“I could—” you begin haltingly, then look away, wishing he couldn’t see your eyes so clearly. “Maybe I could take the room across from yours, if you like.”

Maybe an arrangement like that won’t be as bad as you were dreading before, to be so close to him but unable to touch, it may not be like that at all. Nearness without the risk of you growing too desperate and needy; perhaps it won’t hurt so much when he leaves you if there’s no expectation he’d stay.

You feel his disappointment, more than you see it. His body seems to pull into itself, shrinking away from you. You want to tell him it’s for the best, but you don’t get the chance.

“What are you talking about?” he asks, not upset or angry, but truly surprised. “If that’s what you really want, I won’t stop you, but that’s just dumb. I want you here, with me—and I thought you wanted it too.”

For a moment you can’t say anything at all. Your throat nearly closes up again, this time out of fear. You don’t deserve these things. To have anything is to lose it, to destroy it because you don’t know how to let go—you can’t imagine a world where you’re allowed to have the things you want, to be so happy, not without a cost.

“It’s not that. I just don’t want…”

 _I don’t want you to get tired of me,_ you want to say. You don’t want John to hate you, to regret being with you. “I don’t want to crowd you,” you say instead, and even to your own ears it sounds pathetic.

Yet you’re still surprised when he rolls his eyes outright. Sometimes you forget John is stubborn, just like you; maybe even more.

“Dirk, you’ve been living in my basement for _months_ ,” he groans, exasperated. “When I feel ‘crowded’ I just go for a walk!”

He mimics your tone here, in a manner you would find highly insulting, if it didn’t make you feel so relieved. “If space is really the issue, I think I’ve got enough room in here for your _two_ pairs of suspenders,” he adds, with an incredulous look, daring you to disagree.

“Three, technically,” you say, not to disappoint. He laughs, and you’re grateful for the brief distraction, long enough to work through some of your thoughts.

Did you think this was a one time thing? Somehow, yes, you think you did. Even in the moment, pressed inside you in all the ways you’ve hungered for, holding you to him with desperation and need, you thought, _just once_. At least this once.

Afterwards, who could say? That John might lose interest once he’s had you, or decide the pleasures of it weren’t worth the crime, that the reality of it was not what he expected—all were equally possible to you, ever-present in your thoughts.

But clearly, not in John’s.

As his laughter fades, his gaze softens. He loves to tease you, he always has, but you watch as fondness overcomes him, his body growing tense and still in anticipation.

You never want him to look any other way.

And even if it burns, you never want him to look away.

He’s waiting for an answer. you give it to him in the form of a kiss, bold as you take something you feel doesn’t belong to you, yet his mouth opens for you so readily, as if there is nothing to conquer, as if he had already surrendered.

* * *

Eventually, the work calls you back, as it always does.

It felt good to rest, to spend hour upon hour unhurried in his arms, in his bed, but when John tells you he’s completed the ectological processing for your creation’s head, you’re eager to get back to the lab.

After months and months of grueling work and sleepless nights, the two of you have reached this final precipice, the final procedure before you learn if your endeavor was successful. You don’t know what waits for you beyond this last threshold, but you want to find out. Not only for John, but for yourself.

It could be a joke to have ever thought you could create a life like this, but here, at the end, you know it was not pointless. It brought you here, it brought him to your arms, even if you fail, those things are still true.

At another threshold, however, you do give pause.

John walks into the lab ahead of you, going briskly to the side of the creature’s body for his usual examinations. He has tests to run procedures to start; the clatter of tools and equipment quickly filling the air as you stand there, if just for a few moments.

Over the last few days, it was all too easy to let yourself forget. To let reality slip away as you lost time in John’s arms.

But to be here, again, looking at the face in the tank so much like your own, suspended in this state of rest, you can’t avoid thinking about it anymore. Can’t avoid—him.

You don’t remember deciding to walk closer, or to reach up and touch the glass, yet that’s exactly what you find yourself doing. Your fingertips press against the cold glass, that familiar hum pressing right back against you, electric and otherworldly.

Everything feels so still. Every sound seems to fade away around you; the hum of the tanks, the clatter of John preparing for surgery, it all ebbs away little by little until there’s just the two of you.

You, and the head of your laboratory built twin, separated from you only by glass. You close your eyes.

All around you, John is in motion; working, preparing. And like your creation, all you can do is wait.

You don’t fight the thoughts, when they come. You don’t shy away, recoil, or try to lie to yourself. There is blood on his hands now. There is blood on both of your hands.

You told him he was capable of anything and he showed you that he was.

He wanted to make a family. With you. And what do you want?

The same thing you have always wanted. Him.

You wanted the truth from him before, when you were in the dark, uncertain of what you had, what you were creating in this place together. But confessions change things, and you’re no longer in the dark about anything.

You have what you want.

“Were there any records?” you feel yourself ask. As if this were any other patient who went to the hospital and never left. A cadaver no one would notice was missing an organ here or there, a limb lost in an accident.

The noise behind you stops, just for a second, before it resumes. You don’t know why you asked that, when you already know the answer, so you rephrase the question before he can stumble to answer.

“Do we know what his name was?”

“Henry,” he says easily. “At least, that’s—I heard—”

You hum softly in acknowledgement, but mostly to make him stop.

“Hal, then,” is all you say. You know the person behind the glass is dead, John made it abundantly clear that whoever he was could not survive the ectobiological process nor reanimation.

Whoever he was before, whatever he will be when he wakes up again, you don’t know. But maybe, somehow, the name could feel familiar, comfortable, like home to him.

Maybe this place could be home to him, too.

“Hal it is,” John agrees, and though you don’t turn to face him, you can hear the warmth in his smile.

You stay there for a while, at the side of the tank, gazing into it thoughtfully until John has finished the rest of his preparations and at last comes for the head. He’s careful as he removes it from the solution, the gentle and steady hands of a surgeon, always.

As John cleans and prepares him for the procedure, you simply watch from the side, studying closely. Studying John, studying—him. Hal.

It’s the first time you’re seeing him out of the chemical bath. It was hard to tell through the sea-green cast on everything inside the tanks, but his complexion seems slightly different than you recall. Paler now, bloodless, but his hair seems fine and lightened too, even closer to yours in color than it appeared before.

John lifts his eyelids in turn to be examined, and that’s when you see it. The flash of gray in his irises, almost blue.

You don’t say anything. You’re not even sure if you move. Yet you realize then, what John must have surely seen, the first time he laid eyes on this young man, because you see it too.

You wonder if it felt to him like destiny.

* * *

The surgery takes hours. Hours and hours in which you can only watch, patiently waiting, letting your mind drift in idle daydreams.

As John methodically, painstakingly attaches the head to the rest of the body at the throat, he installs the last of your devices there as well, hidden at the top of the creature’s spine.

The nervous system is so precious, so delicate. You have built complex mechanisms before, some involving hundreds of delicate cables, each more important than the last, and even then, you can only begin to imagine the skill and patience that it takes for a living patient. A once and future living patient, anyway.

Every wire, every screw, every stitch, it all takes time, and as John works you barely make a sound.

Strange to watch his hands move across a body that looks like yours, but is not yours; even stranger that you know what it’s like to have his hands on you at all. You try not to think about it much, not here. Distracting thought.

You don’t need to be here for this procedure, not really. At times you assist, fetching things and holding things, but mostly you watch. You may not need to be here, but you also can’t bear to leave. It’s important—to him, to you.

As the procedure comes to a close, the hour is late, and John is at his limit. Yet once his tools clatter onto his surgical tray for the last time, he stretches, and when he looks at you again he seems different. Awake again, almost, or excited enough to push through his exhaustion. It’s infectious, you think; your heart pounds rapidly all the same.

John steps away to clean up and you quickly take his place at the creature’s side, now fully assembled. Hal’s side. That’s his name. No longer a blueprint or a dream—a physical being, waiting in rest for this moment.

For a moment, you feel tempted to reach out to touch him, as if he might vanish, but you don’t. You wait for John, gazing at what you have created together, in his glory.

It’s not how you pictured it, not long ago. You long thought anything that you and John created in this place would be beautiful, and he is, but you didn’t exactly expect it to look like you. It’s mostly—strange, you suppose. Like looking into a trick mirror, a reflection of some other you, your dream self walking.

All around you, John is working. Connecting Hal to all of your equipment, switching on the machines, and one by one they roar to life.

You close your eyes. Only long enough to take a breath, to exhale under the growing noise. Long enough for John to join you at your side, gently squeezing your hand.

The lights flicker as you open your eyes. You’ve repaired the wiring, replaced most of it, but the electrical demand of the process builds and builds regardless, threatening to black out the lab anyway. The flickering intensifies as the machines roar and shake, peals of electricity cracking loud in your ears, but the lights don’t fail, not even when the machines reach their zenith and shut down, leaving the lab in silence.

And on the table before you, the body begins to move.

You’re not breathing anymore. You remember with such clarity when it was Liv on that table, when the thrash of convulsive jolts turned to life, to living, to a conscious need to move and to breathe.

The lab is so quiet, that same eerie stillness that follows the equipment shutdown, but…altogether too silent.

The body is moving, you can see it and hear it, but—

“Something’s wrong,” John says, his voice like a stab through the stillness, sharper than you’ve ever heard it.

“It didn’t work?”

“I don’t know. Stand back.”

You don’t hesitate. You’re out of his way in an instant at the command in his voice. You stand back and you watch him work, as everything begins to move very fast, surreal yet perfectly in focus. The sheet that covered him falls to the floor, stained and bloody, followed by the cables that connected him to all of your machines, leaving deep purple splatters onto the cold floor.

Hal’s blood is even darker than Liv’s, you note distantly; rich and nearly royal in color. You stare at where it smears on the floor under John’s shoes.

On the table, the body isn’t moving anymore.

All around him, however, John is in motion. John never stops moving. You watch in a daze as he checks Hal’s eyes and pulse and breath, as his hands interlock and press down against the center of his chest, hard and fast, over and over, with a look of determined intensity on his face. His jaw clenches soundlessly, sweat on his temples.

Is this what he was like as a surgeon, you wonder. In the chaos of the operating theater, a dying patient in freefall before his eyes, did he take command of the situation with this same grim focus?

It’s easy to imagine, with the confidence he suddenly evokes, his dark but calm demeanor as he checks the body’s pulse again. And then, to your numb surprise, covers Hal’s mouth with his own, a move that for some reason makes you almost recoil to look away.

You don’t know why. You’re not a doctor, but you’re not a fool, you know what he’s doing. He breathes into the creature’s mouth—Hal, Hal’s mouth—until that narrow chest rises and falls before your eyes. A kiss of life, nothing more, even if it leaves you feeling strange and unsettled to witness.

It seems to go on forever, in silence. It could only have been minutes. John looks flushed and spent, one arm shaking just a little as he props himself up over the surgical table, fingers pressed hard to Hal’s throat with the other.

This time, he seems satisfied by what he finds, enough to slump down to his elbows and then sink down heavily to the floor, taking his own heavy gulping breaths.

You’re with him in an instant, kneeling at his side. On the table above you, Hal breathes, weak and uneven, but he doesn’t move.

What went wrong? Your mind spins in a thousand directions, a thousand questions. There were too many variables, you _knew_ it—this entire dream was doomed from the start, you never could have succeeded—but—no. _No_.

It did work. It’s— _he’s_ alive—or, breathing, anyway. You’ve come so close, even if you’ve somehow failed at this last impossible step.

You manage to keep your thoughts from spiraling, but even so, as John catches his breath, you can’t help but think, _what did I do wrong?_

“What can we do?” you ask instead.

John sighs at first, shrugging weakly. You don’t have to imagine how he’s feeling, in this narrow place between failure and some measure of tentative, possible success.

He’s breathing, after all. There must be something, there has to be.

“If it’s one of my devices, I could…” you start, but John shakes his head.

“I don’t think that’s it,” he says. He sounds hoarse, and takes a moment before continuing. “He’s not responsive. I think—I don’t know, maybe I was wrong. I thought as long as the brain matter was preserved, as fresh and healthy as possible, even as a blank slate…”

He trails off for a while. So long you don’t even know if he intended to keep going. It’s difficult to see him in this state; exhausted, yes, but you’ve seen him tired before. He seems shuttered now, adrift, and that… That you haven’t seen.

“Maybe a severed brainstem isn’t something ectobiology can overcome,” he says, distant and strained. “But even if it is one of the devices, I wouldn’t risk—putting him back to sleep, I guess, because if we’re wrong, there’s no coming back from even more brain damage.”

After a while John sighs, stripping off his work gloves and tossing them to the floor. You watch him as he moves, and yet you’re still surprised when he reaches for your hand, squeezing it in both of his.

Even with the newness of this intimate aspect of your relationship, you simply can’t remember the last time anyone looked to you for comfort. If anyone ever has.

John holds your hand, and you grip him carefully back, briefly frightened you might not know how to let go. You don’t know what to do with affection like this; how to reciprocate without suffocating someone, to know when and how to stop.

John lifts his head, distracting you from your aimless thoughts. His eyes are so beautiful, staring back at you, so bright and so blue.

“Dirk, that machine—the one you told me about,” John says, a series of words so unexpected that for a moment it doesn’t even make sense. “Do you think—no, I’m sorry, that’s insane.”

It takes you a moment to understand, and then you struggle not to laugh simply because everything about your lives right now is completely unreal. What’s one more impossible thing?

Your machine. You haven’t thought about it yourself in months; you’re frankly astonished John remembers it at all.

 _What would you do_ , he had asked, _if nothing could stop you?_

Maybe it shouldn’t surprise you that he remembers that conversation; you certainly do. More importantly, you suspect you know why it’s on his mind, and you gently squeeze his hand, urging him on.

“Tell me what you’re thinking.”

He hesitates, looking pensive, chewing his lip as he works through his thoughts. “You called it an imprint,” he says. “A map. Could it act like a blueprint of a healthy brain? Could it wake him up?”

You don’t know. You really don’t know. The device you’ve envisioned has never existed out of your own mind and now, here…

“I think so,” you hear yourself say. He squeezes your hand, his expression burning with hope, and you can’t seem to stop the words from coming. “I can build it. We could try.”

All at once, John exhales between you; it’s a giddy rush of laughter, the kind that seems to be a coin flip from tears.

“Okay,” he says shakily, squeezing your hand. “Okay. Let’s do it. Let’s try.”

Even with the smile on his face, you don’t think you’ve ever seen him look so tired. With Hal breathing soft and rasping above you, it seems clear that John has reached the limit of his strength, the mania that keeps him going day after day. But it’s fine; it’s your turn to take over.

His hand may tremble as he holds onto you, but with care, you pull him back to his feet.

* * *

Together, the two of you quickly rig a device to help him breathe, to continuously oxygenate his ectobiologically engineered cells and keep him in this fixed state until you can complete your machine.

In suspension, even now.

Not quite alive, not quite dead, and waiting for you.

* * *

John sleeps for nearly a day afterwards, but you go back to work.

It’s not long before you’re to spending nearly every waking moment in the lab, in a flurry of activity that makes days and weeks blur together. At least now you no longer sleep down here; you’re quite grateful for it, considering the state of your company.

Across the room from you, John’s workspace has transformed from a surgical ward to something like a hospital room. There is even a privacy sheet hanging between your side of the lab and his, which you thought John set up for your benefit more than Hal’s, given the close quarters. But then, he is a doctor—and Hal is, in a sense, not only his creation but now his patient as well.

It’s just the two of you, most of the the time. You and your lab-built twin. Hal can’t be taken away from the machines keeping him alive, and all of your equipment and tools are here. It would take far too long to move either of you, and so in the lab you both stay.

John spends as much time in the lab as he is able, but his obligations at the hospital haven’t disappeared. In fact, he’s been working even more hours than usual, as if to make up for his, well, _eccentric_ behavior as of late.

“I don’t want anyone to say I’ve become unreliable!” he insists, and you try not to laugh.

There isn’t much he can do to assist you, anyway. He keeps you company, when it’s not too distracting, and he monitors Hal’s condition, but now, all he can do is wait, and watch.

It would feel like a lot of pressure, usually, but you feel far too motivated to let doubt and nerves creep in. You want this, more than anything—not just for John or for Hal, but for yourself. You’ve wanted this for years, and now you have the chance.

* * *

You told him you could build your machine, and you meant it. You’ve _dreamed_ of building this machine.

But when you sit down to work, the extent of what you need to accomplish threatens to overwhelm you from the start.

Bitterly, you remember prototypes you’ve built of it, back in Derse, taunting you with their very existence so far away. Various hopeful designs you left behind, assuming you would be back within weeks. And now it would take months to send for them, time you don’t want to waste, and so you start from scratch.

It seems a curse at first, frustrating and time consuming all the same, but soon you come to see what a gift it is. You’ve learned a great deal since your initial notions of it, how a machine like that might function and how it might give you the answers you seek, and you know that your old prototypes would only have set you back, forcing you to reconcile what you had already built with your new and more sophisticated imaginings.

Besides—after a few weeks, you can admit it—your earliest prototypes were built from barely more than scrap metal, toy models. The components you truly needed were far too expensive or rare to even consider a practical attempt at building the machine.

You felt strongly that it _could_ be done, but developing a functional version of your device was beyond your means, and for years you let it fade into an idle daydream.

You have means, now. It used to make you feel vaguely uncomfortable, spending John’s money so freely even when all you were doing was outfitting your half of the lab for _his_ project. You don’t feel that way anymore. You know what you need, and you know he has the resources to provide it.

More than that, even—John’s more than aware of his shortcomings with machinery, and seems more than happy to offer his assistance in what ways he can. Even if it means signing off on purchases that would have staggered you in the beginning, that you never would have allowed yourself to ask for, and he doesn’t even blink.

For John, you must remind yourself, this project is about so much more than scientific ambition. It’s about the two of you, the culmination of all you can create together, the time and energy you’ve spent, the love and care you put in to every step.

It’s about family.

* * *

You spend most of your time in the lab, yes, but not all of it.

The house feels so full now. Sound seems to fill the air, wherever you go, even voiceless. It’s true that Hal’s company is somewhat wanting in his current state, but it’s novel for you to live in a place that you share with anyone, anything but machines.

In the lab, Hal sleeps, his presence felt with every uncertain breath. In the kitchen, Liv rattles around in her new improved cage, exploring whatever additions John has brought her. And upstairs, you have John.

You’ve shared a bed before, but never like this. For a night, sure. Maybe even a week or two. But never with someone that cared to wake up with you as much as you did them. Someone who delights in touching you and holding you, often starting the day much as you finished the last, kissing you deep and sweet, sliding inside you without restraint or shame.

And you love it. You love him.

But sometimes, even now, when you go to fall asleep each night, in John’s arms, in John’s bed, you catch yourself wondering, time and again, how long this could possibly last.

Before you lose it. Before you ruin it.

* * *

You are not an ectobiologist in the way that John is, you will never be a doctor, but in turn, he is not an engineer.

You think on these things when you work into the night. When your hands are occupied cutting and twisting and welding, your mind drifts, but not unpleasantly. Instead, you think that perhaps he never could have gotten to this point without you, but he has done the same for you.

Without John, you wonder how long you would have gone in circles with this device, if you could have built it at all, if you had not seen what it would need to work, inside and out. Without him, you imagine it would have stayed hopelessly incomplete, destined to rust away on a shelf.

You may not be an ectobiologist, but what you have taken from his lessons has aided you in other ways. Ectology has come to shape your designs, it informs how you can craft metal devices to seamlessly work with and inside a living, physical body.

 _This is part of you_ , ectology tells the body. That metal and electrical components are as natural as every other part. A dozen lives that now function as one, powered by fine gears that twist and turn under stitched together scars.

* * *

You honestly try not to work all night, these days. You don’t really need to. You don’t sleep down here anymore. You don’t _need_ to work yourself to the bone just to have a chance at rest, alone in your cold cot, your mind empty.

Not with John upstairs waiting for you, a warm body in a bed that you share.

But tonight, you work late, buoyed by inspiration rather than desperation, but even as you finally stop for the evening, something stops you. Something compels you to Hal’s bedside, and you find yourself watching him for a while—your strange creation, asleep.

The body in the basement, that you both built by hand.

You think back on what John said to you—that he’s like your child, in a sense. But truth be told, you don’t see him that way. To you, he’s an echo, a reflection—something that mirrors you, but is not part of you. Not a child—not _your_ child—but something like family all the same.

Like a brother, almost. Your heart aches to think about it, just for a twinge. Maybe you wouldn’t mind that, having a brother again. This one younger, just by a hair.

And John’s not entirely wrong, after all—if the imprint is successful, you think it’s possible you could impart some aspects of yourself to him. Behavioral, mostly, like any other genetic link.

It’s funny to think about it, to picture the body in front of you not just breathing but truly living, thinking. You almost laugh to imagine passing along your taste for philosophy, or if he’ll disappoint you by taking John’s more binary perspective on morality, human nature.

Regardless, he’ll be his own person, some new creature unlike anything else, and will see the world through a lens you can only guess at. The more you think about it, the more you long to discuss it with him, one day.

You hope you get the chance.

* * *

It’s late when you get to bed. Virtually morning. John barely stirs when you join him in bed these days, but as you slide under the sheets, you find him awake.

“Did I wake you?” you ask, and take the chance, before he can even answer, to curl up close to him, hungry for the heat of him under the covers after hours spent in the sterile chill of the lab.

Though you still always halfway expect it, he doesn’t pull away. He wraps an arm around you without a second thought.

“No—no, I’ve been up, I’ve been thinking,” he says quietly. You hum curiously as you settle; you know he’ll tell you, but you’re still surprised when he adds, “Um, about school.”

“Really,” is all you can manage. It’s not meant to be unwelcoming, but memories of your time in university can be somewhat fraught, and it’s been a long night.

He’s silent for a while after, and you wonder if that was the wrong thing to say, or if he’d somehow fallen asleep.

Eventually, you feel him fidgeting. His fingers trace the stitches on the blanket wrapped around you, and though you can’t quite see his face in the darkness, you can easily picture his worried brow, the anxious way he chews on his lip.

“Just, remembering things, I guess.”

“Anything in particular?” you finally prompt.

“You, mostly,” he says it so casually, as if the answer should be obvious, and of course you should have known. “And—all that nonsense around your expulsion—”

Ah, exactly the memories you didn’t want to think about. You try not to wince when he’s so close to you, but if you go slightly stiff in his arms, it doesn’t make him pull away.

“—it was all so stupid, so unfair, I even got my father to write a letter for you and it didn’t make any difference—”

You didn’t know that. Your heart pounds in your chest, and you try to relax. You also try not to think too hard on what it must have looked like for John to advocate for you so fiercely, to even put the weight of his family name behind you, given the true nature of your expulsion. You suppose his reputation was strong enough to take the hit; yours most certainly wasn’t.

“I hated it,” he sighs, the agitation leaving him easily once he’d voiced it. “And when you were gone… Ugh, it all just felt so pointless. Everything was so _boring_ without you there.”

His chin rests on your shoulder, and you feel very still. “In my entire life, I don’t think I’d ever met anyone as difficult as you were, back then,” he says idly.

Part of you wants to feel insulted, but the rest of you instead feels strangely proud to have left such a mark. Particularly when you’re having this conversation while wrapped in his arms.

“I thought you could stand to get knocked down a peg or two,” you say, no attempt at hiding the smugness in your words. Most of your classmates could, as you recall. “Nothing you couldn’t handle.”

He grumbles something under his breath that only makes you want to laugh at him more, but his fidgeting touch grows careful and exploratory, and you have no desire to interrupt him.

“You drove me crazy, you know,” he says, with a familiar exasperation, warmed by familiar fondness. “But I liked it when—when I could surprise you.”

He did surprise you, often. He still does, even more so now.

“A lot of people expected things from me, but not you?” he continues. “I always had to work for it. I wanted to impress you.”

On some level, you’ve always known that. Why else would John have participated in your rivalry so readily, so happily, if he didn’t get something out of it? Even if it was as simple as shutting you up from time to time. With his grades, his status, he could have ignored you as easily as an insect, like almost everyone else did in that school.

But he didn’t; and now, here you are.

You, on the other hand, had everyone to impress. And when you did excel, it didn’t matter, people found ways of excusing it away through luck or cheating. Even if no one could prove it.

It mattered to you, so very much, that John saw you as an equal then. That he was the one person you didn’t have to fight for his respect. John gave it to you readily, happily, because he saw how you deserved it.

And, in turn, he wanted to prove to you he was more than a title, more than the fortunate son of a wealthy family.

“You did impress me,” you say to him softly. It’s not a confession; he should most certainly know it. Yet you still feel different, freer, to have said it aloud. “And you still do. Sometimes.”

He chuckles against the back of your neck, squeezes you in his arms. You want to tell him so many things. That you hated him because you knew he was better than you—not in wealth or class but in kindness, offering you friendship when you didn’t deserve it. And you loved him with the same breath for all the same reasons.

You want him to know, but the words don’t come.

John holds you for a while in silence. You nearly drift off once or twice, with the sky lightening outside the bedroom windows. He says something you don’t quite catch, too soft, mumbled into your hair, and you murmur some noise in question.

“Do you remember Jane, from class?” he repeats.

You do, actually. She was distant, but kind to you, which was still an improvement on the reception you got from the rest of your classmates.

“She saw you in the business district, a couple days in a row. She told me you were in town. That’s how I knew.”

You suddenly don’t feel very tired at all. You twist in his arms, rolling over to face him, uncertain of what exactly to read into this new information. You’ve long thought it was a coincidence, but for an instant your thoughts spin darkly, and it isn’t until you see John’s eyes and the worried line of his mouth that you can take a breath again.

“I wasn’t trying to hide it,” he says in a whisper, his hand coming to stroke your cheek. “I didn’t even know for sure that I’d find you. But I wanted to see you so bad, I… I kept thinking if I didn’t, then I really would leave.”

He wanted a reason to stay, he says—a reason to keep trying, a reason to live. You’ve never thought you could be that for anyone.

You relax by degrees, John’s fingers tracing your jaw, but you don’t know what to say. In the absence, John’s gaze grows distant, but his hand on you feels so grounding.

“She asked me if I remembered you,” he says. “As if the happiest I’ve ever been wasn’t when you were here, when I first met you.”

When his father was still alive, you think. When you were part of his life. He wanted to go back. But you can’t go back, not really. Neither of you can get back the things you’ve lost. Years, people, opportunities.

But what that leaves you is the future, stretching out before you in endless possibility, here at his side.

“You should have told me,” is all you say. Maybe this—what you’ve created between you, would not have been so difficult, so confusing.

“I know,” he admits, nodding. You watch his throat work around a hard swallow. “I thought you could help. There’s so much I don’t know how to say. But I thought—maybe you might understand.”

You do. The thought feels like an anchor, heavy and grounding.

Affection has always been difficult for you, in the life you’ve led. Despite how deeply you feel, about anything or anyone, you show very little. Over the years, you’ve largely found that the pain of hiding how you feel is nothing compared to the pain of exposing it.

Maybe this is something you both share, after all.

You speak with actions instead then, and close the distance between you with a kiss, one he returns, moaning into your mouth and pulling you to him, as close as you can get.

You follow readily where he pulls, warming to it with barely a pause, and start to reach for him under his soft sleep clothes. You want to make him feel good, you love to make him feel good. He stops you, and you’re too confused to fight it as he presses your hands to the bed at your sides instead.

“Let me,” he whispers. “Let me.”

He lays you back, takes you into his mouth, and you let him. Of course you let him. You can’t imagine a world in which you wouldn’t.

* * *

Day after day, you work and you build.

You design and create a hundred delicate and identical components that make up the scanning mechanism for your device. It’s tricky to wire, tricky to test, but your progress is good and faster than you thought it would be.

You’ve learned a great deal here, you think, with all that you’ve built, and how it has pushed your limits and experience.

Nonetheless, it still takes time, time that you can’t rush, can’t waste.

You’re getting closer now. And the closer you get, the more meticulous your work becomes, painfully slow, leaving you vulnerable to the mercurial nature of your thoughts.

You’re a little better at fighting it now, but sometimes—sometimes you confront the fears swirling in the background of your mind, leaving you questioning your own motivations behind the work.

You worry if you agreed to this simply because you wanted the machine—that you wanted any opportunity to build what you could never have built before, and were merely glad for the excuse, whether or not it can do what John wants.

That fear persists in you, and it never really fades, but the closer you get to completion, the more you think it doesn’t matter. You think it could work. Even if your intentions were selfish, maybe—maybe you weren’t _wrong._

If it works, then it doesn’t matter what your intentions were. That’s what you tell yourself, over and over.

That it could be enough, even if you aren’t.

* * *

There’s a rhythm to the sounds in the house. The low rumble of the machines keeping Hal alive fade into the background as you work, and when John is home and downstairs with you, even the low din of conversation isn’t enough to disrupt the familiar quiet of this place.

Not quite stillness, not quite silence, but a kind of peace you know well enough to sense when it has been disturbed.

John keeps the heavy lab door open, these days—the lab is no longer filled with parts in need of refrigeration, and the space could use the ventilation when you’re soldering.

You can’t hear everything; but you distinctly hear a knock. Distant, soft, but you tense at the sound at once, waiting for it to go away, but it only repeats, louder now.

You look over at John in time to see his blue eyes widen, glancing up at the rafters as the knocking continues.

You get deliveries at the house, you remind yourself. It shouldn’t be unsettling to hear a knock at the door. But when groceries arrive, parcels and crates filled with machine components and medical supplies, you sign for all of it at the servant’s entrance.

This knock is from the front door. No one delivering a package comes to the front door. Even _you_ don’t use the front door, thinking of it as leading to a world you’re simply not part of—society and status, well lit and highly visible to everyone else on this street.

John’s in motion before you can ask who could be visiting, what they could want, walking towards the door.

“Just stay here,” he says quietly. “There’s no reason to be nervous.”

He says it steadily enough, but he looks pale and almost skittish as he bounds up the basement stairs two steps at a time.

Quietly, you move to stand at the threshold of the lab, just beside the door,straining your ears to listen as John walks through the house. By the time he reaches the front door to open it, he’s clearly schooled his nerves well, sounding perfectly cordial as he greets his visitor.

Try as you might, you can’t hear anything. Nothing useful, an exchange of voices that sounds friendly enough, but in Prospitian high society, that means nothing. You don’t dare follow John up the stairs, as much as you’d like to listen from the kitchen, much too afraid you might be heard or spotted.

There’s just too much at stake; you can’t risk it. You’re scared, you can admit that; standing here in this illegal lab, this unnatural place, with all the things you’ve done here and everywhere else in the house.

But looking down at your hands, you wonder exactly when you picked up a spare pipe. The basement is full of mechanical detritus, on tables and piled in the corners wherever you could find the space. You barely felt yourself take it in hand, but it’s there anyway, gripped in your tight and bloodless fist.

You wait, as the voices above you soften and fade. You stand so very, very still, and you wait, but your thoughts race in fear.

You knew it, you think. You’ve never been allowed to keep anything that truly mattered to you. You knew you nothing here could last, that you would never be allowed to keep this life and all of these things you don’t deserve—but you’re not ready to give them up, either.

What will happen, if someone comes down these steps—if you see anything but familiar blue eyes, what will you do?

You already know. No one will cross this threshold, not if you don’t want them to.

Through the haze of these thoughts, you almost miss the sound of footsteps approaching above you. The weight of one man, floorboards creaking under his familiar gait.

You know it’s John. You know he’s alone. But you can’t get yourself to relax, to let go of the pipe, not until you see him and only him wandering back into the lab as if in a daze.

When you do see him, you exhale heavily, and his eyes find you standing there, brandishing a piece of scrap metal like a sword. He seems rattled, but he smiles at the sight of you anyway.

“It’s okay,” he says, though his voice is thin. “It was just someone from the hospital. I’ve been—distracted, um. I—I guess I left this—”

His words trail off uncomfortably, and in his hands you see a leather-bound case. His, actually—once his father’s. You’ve seen it a dozen times as he takes it to the hospital each day and brings it right back home.

“He said he’s never seen me without it,” John continues, in that same dazed manner. “Thought he’d drop by on his way home.”

Forgetfulness is one thing; he looks deeply shaken, and you’re very afraid of what that could mean. 

Without quite looking at you, John unbuckles the case, reaching inside and under a false bottom. From there, he retrieves a small notebook, one you instantly recognize, and know precisely what it contains.

“Do you think he looked inside?” you ask; very, very quietly.

John stares down at his hands, looking plainly guilty and distressed, but he doesn’t hesitate to shake his head.

“No,” he answers. “Professional courtesy might be one thing, but we’re not that close. If he had…”

You don’t need to guess how that sentence ends. The Queensguard likely would not have knocked so politely, had anyone looked at John’s notes. And not just anyone—a fellow doctor, another pathologist from the ectobiology lab? They’d know exactly what they were looking at. They’d be compelled to turn it over. They’d have to, or face the same penalties.

This was far too close. Your heart pounds in your chest.

You try to keep your thoughts from spiraling, but you barely hear John set the case down. Barely see him approach until his hands are cupping your face gently, urging you to look at him.

“I’ll take care of you, you know that?” he says, meeting your eyes unblinking. “I’m not going to let anything happen to you.”

You know that. You do. You don’t know that he would succeed; but you know he would try.

“I’m sorry,” he adds, “I’ll be more careful, I’m so sorry,” but you don’t want to hear it now. You don’t want to think.

“Take me to bed,” you say instead, your words soft yet commanding, and he does.

* * *

John takes leave from the hospital, after that. You don’t know what reasoning he gives, only that they allow it, and you’re relieved.

Stretching himself too thin leads to mistakes, and neither of you can afford mistakes at this point. 

Though, you don’t think you realized how much his day to day job was keeping his mind occupied until he’s home all the time. There’s not much he can do to help you, and occasionally have to chase him off to keep him from staring over your shoulder as you work.

Even then, all he can do is tend to Hal to keep himself busy. He’s unused to being idle, and you can tell he’s anxious, but he’s not the only one.

Every day, another component of your machine becomes complete, another small part making up the whole.

And despite the fear, the stress of it, sometimes you don’t want these days to end. There will always be a part of you that loves the work, loves the challenge, and even more, that you get to share it with John.

You love to spend your nights solving this mad, universal riddle at his side, and your days asleep with his arms wrapped around you.

Yet the the longer this takes, the greater the risk. To both of you.

To all of you.

* * *

On low power, you test the device on yourself, on John, even on Liv.

At this stage, the scan feels like barely more than a tickle to you when you wear the device, and collects readings only strong enough to register that you’re awake or asleep, or if you’re a rabbit.

It’s not even close to what you really need, but enough to make you feel giddy with excitement at your progress, the possibilities of success and what it could look like. Even at half power, it can detect blood vessels and nerves through the skin, as well as detect neurons firing with or without stimuli.

There’s nothing you can _do_ with the scan at this point, but it’s further than you’ve ever gotten, and makes you feel more confident than ever that the machine can be completed. That it can do exactly what you need it to do.

John shares in your excitement, though he complains the scan gives him a headache, and you’ve had to bribe him more than once to be your test subject while fine-tuning the sensor array.

Eventually, you test the device on Hal. The reading you get is grim, though doesn’t surprise you—a dark reflection of your own mind, and John’s, with little activity that can be detected, even subconscious.

It’s sobering, a reminder of how fragile the mind is. You wonder if the imprint really could work, in a way it never could with an already healthy brain, when there is so little left of the person he was before.

From what you can tell, there indeed may be nothing left, a blank slate. The image of his mind that you see is so dark and desolate and empty that it hurts you.

And you want to help. You can fix it, you know you can.

* * *

The closer you get, the harder it is not to imagine. Not merely success, and what that could be, but the result of success—the life you are on the verge of starting.

A life after this madness, making this house a home, with the closest thing to a family a creature like you could ever have.

You don’t have time to waste. This week you’ve barely slept, and you need to sleep. It’s been days. But the night finds you in the lab alone, staring at his face for so long that your eyes burn.

What is he? What will he become, with your mind as the roadmap?

You just need to capture brain patterns, primarily subconscious patterns—all the instinctual processes that keep your body alive without you having to give it a moment’s thought. That’s the goal, of course, the priority, but you know it will also capture conscious brain patterns.

You’ve known that for a while. You suspect it’s likely he may absorb some of your mannerisms, you could learn what parts of your behavior might be truly hardwired, if they somehow get passed along, but…

You start to wonder, as you always do, when your thoughts are unguarded—what else could you impart from this process? What parts of you could imprint on his mind, a blank slate, an empty shell?

It’s impossible to transmit memories, isn’t it? To transmit—feelings?

It must be impossible. The imprint is an echo, an afterimage. That’s all it is, all it could ever be, you’re sure of it.

You have to be sure.

* * *

When you first came to this place, you saw in your own skills what John had seen; that engineering was the missing link for his project, that he could only succeed with your help.

It takes you longer to see how ectology is the missing link for the machine, but eventually you do.

In all the time you’ve daydreamed about it, in all of the loose blueprints you allowed yourself to sketch on napkins, you knew there was something missing. You could complete the scan, you could have recorded it, perhaps even _stored_ it on the devices you’ve prototyped—but that was it. There was nothing you could _do_ with it, no mechanism to view or understand what made any one mind unique from another.

A single image of a brain is not what you are trying to accomplish. A portrait, in motion, capturing every brushstroke that makes a person _what they are_ , that—that cannot be recorded on a still frame. But ectobiologically engineered cells are neither living nor dead, and cannot be constrained to any static image.

You’re not an ectobiologist, but you’ve learned enough from John to describe what you need, and to your specifications he alchemizes a compound that your machine can recognize and translate.

To help record a living snapshot of your mind, healthy neurons firing as you breathe and blink and move. As your heart beats, unassisted; all the things Hal’s body can no longer remember how to do.

It felt like it took years to get to this point. Endless nights of endless work. You wanted it to be over, for so long, you wanted to be done.

When the day comes, you ready the machine, hold the needle in your hand, and you wish you’d had more time.

While you intended to complete the injection yourself, John steps in. He makes you sit, and takes the needle in his steady hand.

You’re fine, you insist; even if you’re not a surgeon, this part isn’t so complicated. You’re not shaking or afraid. Needles don’t scare you, blood doesn’t bother you.

But he ignores all of those details and asks you, of all things, if you’re sure.

“I wouldn’t be here if I weren’t,” you tell him. At the end of it all, the end of this road together… the edge of this cliff together.

It doesn’t matter if you’re telling the truth, though you’d like to think you are.

He doesn’t hesitate for long; you know he wants this too much to fight it, but his concern is writ plain on his face, and when the needle touches your skin, you barely feel it at all with his care.

Inside the vial, the compound is inert and dark, but inside the body, you know it will glow.

He stands at your side, waiting and watching, as you connect yourself to your machine. There was only so much testing you could do, with a device like this. Truth be told, you don’t know what it will be like at full power.

You won’t have John circling you in concern, either, you need him at the other end of the device, where everything connects to—the creature, your creature, Hal.

John didn’t hesitate for long, and you don’t either. You only need long enough for the compound to cycle to the brain, not even a minute. You can think a lot of things in a minute, cycle through all sorts of feelings, but nothing changes.

For a long time, when you looked back on the landscape of your life, you often wondered if loss and destruction was all you could ever have.

You’ve never dared to hope for anything but—you hope that you’re wrong. You just want to be enough. You want to be... _please_ , you think. _Let this be enough._

“Dirk,” John whispers, interrupting your thoughts. If he says anything else, you miss it under the sound of your heart racing.

You turn on the machine, and for one agonizing second, everything burns.

* * *

You wake up on your back, disoriented, with your head pounding. You’re still in the lab.

You blacked out, you think. You were sitting upright, but when you open your eyes, you find yourself on the floor. It could have been minutes, it could have been hours—it’s impossible to tell here, but you’re not alone, and John is at your side in a heartbeat.

“You’re okay,” you hear him say, calm and steady. “You’re okay. Dirk, look at me, let me see your eyes.”

Your head is _pounding_. There’s a ringing in your ears, shrill enough it seems deafening, but it feels as though it’s coming from somewhere inside of you, every part of you screaming in pain.

 _No_ , you think. Not in pain. You’re terrified. You need to speak, but your throat is so tight, your heart pounding so heavy and fast in your chest it leaves you dizzy. Your vision swims until you think you might black out again, clutching John’s hands with as much strength as you can muster.

“We need to stop, we have to stop.” Your voice is gasping, it sounds so faint. “John, this was a mistake, we have to stop—”

John doesn’t hear you. Maybe he doesn’t understand. You’re not speaking clearly; too fast, too panicked.

“Dirk, deep breaths. I’m here, it’s okay,” he’s whispering, and through your blurry vision you see him examine your eyes and feel the press of his fingers against your throat.

It’s not okay. You’ve doomed him. You’ve doomed all that the two of you have built with your bitter heart, with all of the ugly things inside of you that you hide from the world.

In a terrified rush you think, _it should have been John_.

You should have used John’s mind for the imprint, John’s heart. Never yours, so dark and so broken.

Hal’s very creation was meant to be an expression of love, of a kind, but by using your mind… now his existence carries a poisonous seed at the center that can never be taken back, and you’re terrified.

“I’m here, I’ve got you,” John’s still saying. “C’mon, look—”

Your body is moving. John’s helping you stand. He’s not listening, maybe you’re still not making sense, but he brings you to the side of the surgical slab and you see what he wants you to see.

Hal is disconnected from the machines. His chest rises and falls as you watch. He’s breathing on his own, unassisted, taking deep and steady breaths as his eyes move below their lids.

Dreaming. He’s dreaming.

It’s done. It’s too late.

You look at John, trying to find the words for all your fear, and he smiles as he meets your eyes. He’s so happy. He’s _so_ happy.

It worked, he says, beaming like sunlight—it worked because of you.

“I’m sorry,” you say, the first words that he seems to understand, for the look on his face turns quickly to concern.

You’re still unsteady from using the machine, though that’s not why your legs buckle. You’re scared, you’re dizzy, and you hurt—but you’re so, so scared.

Feeling weak, you slip to the ground and he follows you, breathless and worried, cradling your head, checking you again for the sign of some concussion. You know he won’t find one, but you don’t want him to pull away. You need him. You need him so much. You want him to take care of you; you don’t want to be afraid.

You want him to tell you it’s okay again, until you believe it, until he can make it true for you.

In desperation you cling to him, and in surprise he kisses your forehead, your cheek, and then at last your lips, where you open for him readily, and his nervous fear turns again to giddiness and joy.

“Dirk—”

“I’m okay,” you lie between kisses, because he needs to hear it, or he might stop. “I’m okay.”

You look up, with John’s hands around your face, while he kisses you so sweetly, and just above your head, you watch pale, shaking fingers curl around the side of the surgical table.

Here, in this place, you were never alone. Now, you think, no matter where you go, neither of you will ever be alone again.

* * *

You wake up. You were asleep, you think. It’s hard to say. Maybe you blacked out again.

One moment, you were in the dark, and the next, you are here.

You remember—you woke up cold, tired, hungry. Everything hurt, and nothing made sense. Too loud, too bright, too painful.

You remember wishing with all of your heart that it would stop; it must have, at some point, because again you wake up. It’s warmer now, and even brighter, but this time it doesn’t hurt.

Not as much, anyway; this time it’s a soft and distant ache, like a bruise that fills your entire body, fading a little at a time.

It’s fine though. You’re never awake for long. You sleep (again), and when you wake up (again), your body barely hurts at all.

* * *

When you dream, it’s cold, and it’s dark. Everything around you is sharp edges. Metal. Glass.

The dreams follow you into your waking hours, sometimes; when you see yourself in mirrored surfaces. In that cold place, there were many, and when you see yourself you remember.

You were afraid. So very afraid. You don’t know why, and your reflection holds no answers. Sometimes your eyes seem strange to you in the mirror, bright and almost burning blue, but you have known them to look no other way.

You don’t know what you’re expecting, only that you feel surprised.

And why? You don’t know what else you should look like. You only know what you are. What you can see. It’s—confusing, sometimes. It’s confusing most of the time. When you’re awake, your thoughts are a fog.

To help you sleep, you count the stitches on your arms and legs, all the ones you can see, because you can never finish before you eventually fall asleep.

* * *

You feel very alone here, but you're not. 

Voices move around you, blurry figures that become shapes like you a little more and more every day. They talk to you, they care for you, but then they go away and you rest and rest and rest.

You hear the word _father,_ once.

You frown at that, though you're not sure why. Your father is… Your father… It doesn’t matter. You don’t remember. You’re confused, but you’re not stupid. You know this man is not, because he’s not that much older than you, and he looks almost nothing like you, apart from his eyes.

It’s a joke, you think, one not meant for your ears, but one that makes his partner roll his eyes and pretend he’s not smiling, though you can see it as clear as anything.

Because looking at that man is like looking into a mirror.

His eyes are different, though. Amber gold to your blue. Should it feel familiar? It does, then it doesn’t, depending on how clear your thoughts are when you wake.

Days and nights blur together when you sleep, and you sleep so often, but sometimes your mind feels very clear.

Neither of them are your father, you know that much. But they’re—something, to you. 

And the other, the one with eyes like yours, he’s different. You don’t feel afraid of him, you feel as though you’ve known him all your life.Sometimes you think, of course you have; there’s never been anything for you beyond these four walls, or that strange cold place.

More and more, they speak to you.

 _How do you feel?_ they ask you. _Can you clench your fist?_ (yes), _can you turn your head?_ (yes), _can you speak?_ (maybe?)— _do you know your name?_

You don’t know that. Your thoughts are a fog. You understand them, you recognize when you’re hungry and when you’re thirsty, but you don’t know your name, and you don’t know where you are.

“Your name is Hal,” your mirror image tells you, one day.

It feels good to hear him say it. It feels right. But he doesn’t quite look at you, and it makes you feel adrift for reasons you don’t understand. 

You remember fear, sometimes; distant, as if through a haze, distant like a dream. You wonder what he’s afraid of. If it’s something you should fear. You don’t know. There’s so much you don’t know.

 _Hal_ , you think. You know that. You know that much.

“We’re your family,” says the man with eyes like yours. He looks right at you. He doesn’t look away, and something inside you aches, deeper than any bruise. “This is your home,” he tells you.

Much like your name, it feels familiar. It does. It should feel right. You want it to feel right. He looks like he believes it, anyway—that perhaps if he says it enough, he could make it true for you.

You want to let him try. You think you will. Maybe it couldn't hurt, you figure. At least with him here, you don't feel so alone. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so, so much for coming along with me on this very strange adventure. This is the end of the story I imagined for the dirkjohn Big Bang, but [vaguely gestures @ the shiny new series tag], it has expanded a lot since I first planned it. 
> 
> If a full sequel doesn't pan out I still have ideas for some short things in this universe, not just from Dirk's POV but also Hal and John's. (Though, fair warning, I've described my inspiration for the extended universe as a mix of Rocky Horror Picture Show and Interview With a Vampire on top of Frankenstein, for all that implies.)
> 
> Again, thank you so much for reading, it's really meant the world to me.

**Author's Note:**

> also a big thank you to my delta server pals who have been so supportive and @[ectobaby](https://www.instagram.com/ectobaby/) for not only hosting this awesome event but for all your help, encouragement, and drawing this [fucking gorgeous poster](https://www.instagram.com/p/CKIWq6hAgzk/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link). you're the best and ilu 🥺💕
> 
> if you want to find me elsewhere, I'm on [twitter](https://twitter.com/ectohussy)/[tumblr](https://ectohussy.tumblr.com) and [instagram](https://www.instagram.com/spacehussy/)!


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